Discussion Forum

asiral

Member

Registered: May 18, 2013

Posts: 43

Content Entry Suggestion

Hi, guys:

I thought I would throw out a suggestion that I think has the potential to revolutionize (pardon if this eventually seems exaggerating) BigTree and really make it stand out from other CMSes than I feel it already does.

With the possible caveat that rich text editors can give you a little more control (I, personally, don't think so but I am sure there are use cases), I think the best approach to content entry would be using the 'contenteditable' attribute.

If you're familiar with Medium.com, they use this to write their posts and I think it's becoming increasingly more common.  They also have a very lean framework of Javascript to control input.  I think it would be straightforward enough to create a lean framework around the entry of special structures into this content editable area (such as a callout like a photo gallery).  Moreover, it dramatically increases the flexibility and even paves the way for a truly drag-and-drop interface.  For more on what I'm talking about, see my previous post: http://www.bigtreecms.org/discussion/di … -templates and for a good example of a drag-and-drop CMS (although much else about it is bloated and poor, in my opinion, is Adobe CQ (formerly Day CQ) or now called Adobe WEM).

This method also lends itself to realtime saving of drafts.  I'm also imagining that the lean framework allows entry of a 'callout' on the page whereby filling in the fields for a piece of content, retrieves the generated markup and inserts it where desired.  The inserted content itself would not be editable as the 'rich text' is, but can present the same dialog box to constrain input when double-clicked or triggered in some other.  What's more, this avoids the awful overhead and load times of some rich text editors and frees you and your product from another dependency.

A quick list (some re-iteration) of how this would improve the user experience: potential in-page editing, flexible content entry, real-time saving of drafts, potential for a future drag-and-drop interface, reduced overhead, load times, and dependencies.  I don't believe I'm terribly oversimplifying at least given the scope I've outlined, although I'm still familiarizing myself with the API for this feature.  But I see a custom implementation centered around this feature being increasing a choice for many content-driven websites as it's intended to be included in the final HTML5 spec.  With the right foundation in place, I would love to help contribute to this kind of improvement to BigTree in the future.

-Michael

timbuckingham

Administrator

From: Baltimore, MD

Registered: April 2, 2012

Posts: 974

Re: Content Entry Suggestion

The biggest issue I see with this approach is that it would require (from what I can think of, anyway) a templating language to properly enable these active areas in templates. One of the core values of BigTree from the developer-side is do-it-your-own-way, so a templating language as a core feature isn't something that would jive well with that.

If you can think of another way to roll something like that in while leaving markup free to be whatever it needs to be I'm all ears. I think it would be really awesome if we could implement it and still leave developers the freedom to do whatever. In the past I tried out different ways to accomplish it (like wrapping HTML blocks in <div> tags with ID's and data- attributes) but it falls apart when we come up against things like image uploads and custom field types (where we have no idea how the data will be output to the template).

Maybe it's something we could make optional? I'm not entirely sure how to make that intuitive for the developer but if you've got some ideas I'm all ears!