Heads-Up: Plans for new Sectional Editing Feature

Editing of sections of a document is supported by SectionalEditPlugin and MultiEditPlugin. These two plugins have the short-coming that editing of included topics is not well supported.

I recently "discovered" that TWiki now supports a tag %STARTSECTION% to denote sections for more precise inclusion. These tags could also be used for designating sections by SectionalEditPlugin and MultiEditPlugin. That way, users would have to learn less syntax, and the same syntax can be used both for section inclusion and section editing.

I am putting together a plugin that combines SectionalEditPlugin and MultiEditPlugin which leverages the new TWiki syntax.

This new plugin will support

• Editing of sections identified in a document by explicit tags
• Editing of sections identified in a document though headings
• Editing of any section included from other topics with proper return to original topic
• Sections identified by a headline will be includable in another topic
• Identified sections can appear anywhere in a document and contain any TWiki ML (even if normally not legal in the context of use).

Please provide any additional input or requirements for such a feature so that I can consider it during implementation.

The home for the new plugin will be EditSectionPlugin.

-- Contributors: ThomasWeigert - 14 Nov 2006

Discussion

Great idea Thomas! I'm/we're looking forward to it. This really will make TWiki even more competitive to other Wiki engines.

-- FranzJosefSilli - 14 Nov 2006

Thomas, I don't think you've looked at inline edit yet. it does sectional editing, but the important distiction is that it does not require any special markup in the topic.

• This hasn't been released yet on twiki.org, has it? -- FJ

Also, it automatically addes edit links to those sections.

-- SvenDowideit - 14 Nov 2006

I'd like to make the label that marks editable sections very flexible (e.g., as in WikiPedia) but would need some help from experts in CSS.

-- ThomasWeigert - 14 Nov 2006

As long as you're looking at this, I'll add one of my top wish-items: to combine sectional editing with one of the alternative editors such as SmartEditPlugin or WikiwygContrib. Most of the problems I have with these editors would be removed if one could restrict the scope of what they edit in a topic. Being able to invoke a specific editors with sectional edit would achieve this.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 14 Nov 2006

And don't forget to keep the TopicObjectModel in mind!

-- FranzJosefSilli - 15 Nov 2006

A question here on how broad this plugin should be: Previously I had two plugins which somewhat overlapped but focused on two essentially different use cases. Of course, both focused on assembling a topic from sections that could be edited separately. But

• The primary use model for MultiEditPlugin was that there would be an outer topic outline where sections are inserted and rendered. For example, that outline might be a table where each cell constitutes a portion of the text. From the user point of view, they would not have access to the overall topic, but only to the editable sections. These sections might be in parts of the topic where normally such text could not go (e.g., multiline text in a table cell).
• The primary use model for SectionalEditPlugin was that there would be a sequence of sections in a topic which could be edited separately, or the topic would be edited as a whole. So the section marking should be not visiable, but inferred from, e.g., the headings in the topic. Consequentially, these sections would never contain other sections.

I am considering combining these use cases as they often are difficult to distinguish except in the boundary cases. However, such imposes performance penalties. E.g., not assuming sections embedded in sections allows much faster processing. Ditto for not having to lift sections out to allow them to appear in "illegal context". I am looking for feedback on what is more important: a simple use model or the performance. I don't think that the performance impact is huge, but the algorithms for the more complex case are definitely not linear.

-- ThomasWeigert - 18 Nov 2006

Make it KISS. That should also reduce the implementation effort. Looking forward to that new plugin.

-- StephaneLenclud - 19 Nov 2006

Please, please, please consider an annotation mode ... ala AnnotationPlugin. It would really help anywhere TWiki was being used to generate official documentation.

It was also added by me as a Feature Request in SectionalEditPluginDev). You had mentioned in the discussion that it might be possible.

-- PankajPant - 22 Dec 2006