[pmwiki-users] Another approach to section editing

[Randy Brown]

Thanks for the lead, Gilles. 

FYI, I've gotten closer to the section-editing I want through PmWiki. It's really cool to be able to zero-in on the desired information. I remember how scared I once was myself: markup deterred me from using wikis for years. But it's easy to fill in a form. Even when the author has to deal with markup, at least that can be minimized and there can be context-sensitive instructions available.

As you recall, I wanted links across the top of my edit form that let me edit any or all of the sections on the page while omitting ugly markup that the user isn't supposed to edit. By "sections" I mean any page variable (or at least the title), any page text variable, or any anchored section that I define in my edit form. I don't want section-edit links on the displayed page, which is the current sectionedit recipe's behavior. 

Here is what I'm going for:

Editing Main.MyPage
  Section:  ALL  Title  MyPTV  MyAnchoredSection  

You are currently editing all sections. Select a specific section above, or click here to edit the whole page. Hover over the section name for help.

Title: [This is the page title]

MyPTV: [This is my page text variable]

MyAnchoredSection: [This is my anchored section]

Please summarize your changes:
[                                                              ]

Save   Save and edit   Preview   Cancel


I can now show the above edit form by using the recipes EditMore or EditAttributes: I simply re-load the page, hiding the normally-edited text area and showing only the section(s) to be edited. 

EditMore only allows me to edit page variables, not page text variables. Neither recipe allows me to edit anchored sections. But I'm so close I have to believe it's possible to modify one or both of those recipes to get what I want. Unfortunately, I don't have the technical skills yet.

Even if I solve anchored sections, I've encountered the following issues:

1. EditAttributes sometimes appends a duplicate set of page text variables to the bottom of the page instead of updating the PTVs in place. 

2. Pages edited using EditAttributes that have (:title {$Namespaced}:) sometimes literally display the title as "{$Namespaced}".

3. EditAttributes refuses to show a field whose value is empty.

4. Guiedit doesn't work on the sections - it only works on the main textarea (which is hidden in my design). I could probably live with that, since the user can toggle back to normal whole-page editing (where the gui edit buttons work) if needed, but it's not ideal.

5. EditMore saves "(:title Talk about {{$BaseName}$Title}:)" as "(::title Talk about My Content Page:)". This means whenever I section-edit my Talk page it becomes hard-wired to the current title of my content page. I want the Talk page's title to automatically change along with the content page's title. I could live with the current behavior if necessary, and I can see how conversion into literal text might sometimes be a desirable side effect, but if I can't control it I'd rather the default be the normal behavior of standard editing: no conversion.

If anyone knows how to solve these problems, or would like to help me solve them, please let me know. 

Randy

On Aug 28, 2010, at 9:46 AM, ABClf wrote:

> Just to mention what I have seen recently in another little flat file wiki : LionWiki has a sectionedit driven by sort of personal ajax that may be worth looking 
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