[geeklog-devel] IKS / Aloha editor

[Dirk Haun]

For those who haven't seen it yet, I've posted a report from the IKS workshop in Amsterdam on geeklog.net yesterday:

  http://www.geeklog.net/article.php/iks-workshop-amsterdam

Thoughts and comments on how to proceed, i.e. whether or not to "go semantic", are very much welcome.


What I didn't mention in that post is that I got a chance to sit down with some of the guys from the Aloha editor, <http://aloha-editor.org/>, who were also present in Amsterdam, and tried integrating it into Geeklog. We got to a "proof of concept" point where it let you edit articles, but actually saving the changes was still missing (that should be about a day's work left to do).

I really like the approach of this editor - it lets you edit your content in place. Just today, I made a longish post on my blog and when it was published, I spotted a typo. So I had to get back into the editor, scroll down to locate the typo, fix it, save, and re-read. With Aloha, I could simply have clicked into the article, right on the word with the typo, and would have been able to fix it there.

This is, of course, quite a different approach than what we have right now and would require a couple of changes all over the place. I talked things through with Norbert Pomaroli (one of the Aloha authors) and I think I have a pretty good idea of what we would have to do for a proper integration.

The only downside right now: Image uploading is not yet possible with Aloha (but it's being worked on). Since it would be a while before we would have finished an integration anyway, it may be ready just in time. I realize image upload is probably the most popular use case for FCKeditor in Geeklog.

As everybody knows, I'm not exactly a fan of FCKeditor ;-) The alternatives I have seen so far didn't really convince me either. The approach that Aloha uses differs from all those other editors and I have to say that I like it.

I could imagine using it when it's integrated into Geeklog. That's probably saying something ;-)

Comments, impressions, likes / dislikes?

bye, Dirk