Power Edit Plugin

OBSOLETE - THIS PLUGIN IS NO LONGER SUPPORTED

It might work, but don't bet on it.

The Plugin formerly known as TWiki:Plugins.PowerEditAddon

The PowerEditPlugin is a plug-in extension to TWiki that supports a Java 1.1 applet text editor. This applet works on most Java-enabled browsers (we haven't tested them all!).

The applet provides the same editing capabilities as a standard browser text area, and adds some common editor functionality:

• Cut, Copy, Paste - the cut buffer is a static variable in the applet as there is no access to the system cut buffer from an applet. The cut buffer persists over different invocations of PowerEditPlugin, however, and you can always use the cut and paste functions in the browser menus to cut and paste outside the window.
• Undo - undoes up to 100 commands per edit session.
• Do again - repeats the last command.
• Find, Replace - optionally use Emacs style regular expressions as provided by the gnu.regexp library. Replace is currently not smart enough to use field replacement, however.
• Can be invoked in a separate frame.
• Programmable buttons.
• Convertor from HTML to TWiki markup

Usage information

Configuring the Buttons and Hot keys

Buttons and hotkeys are all created by reading a user-defined topic which is set by the POWEREDIT_CONTROLS variable (see TWikiVariables). If the variable is not set, the topic TWiki.PowerEditControls is read instead. This allows administrators to set default buttons and keys for the whole installation, for each web, and users can to set up their own controls for the editor by defining this variable in their personal topics. The variable must be set to the full name (including the web) of the topic that contains the control definitions; for example,

      * Set POWEREDIT_CONTROLS = Main.MyPowerEditControls

The control file contains a set of button panel and macro definitions. For example:

macros
   "space" = " "
end
top
   "Tele type" = "/cut/=/paste/="
   "A Space"="/space/"
end
keys
   "^X" = "/cut/"
end

In this example the first button in the top panel will be labelled "Tele type" and will perform the sequence /cut/=/paste/= - which will cut the currently selected text, enter an '=' sign, paste the text and enter another '=' sign. The second button will be labelled "A Space" and will execute the space macro, which in turn is defined to insert a ' ' character. The key "Ctrl+X" will be defined to perform the /cut/ command.

• The four button panels are named "top", "bottom", "left" and "right"
• There can be as many "macros" blocks as you like
• In button blocks, the name is used as the label on the button
• Control keys are denoted by a leading ^ character and must be in upper case e.g. ^A not ^a. Note that some browsers may not support key definitions.
• The command string is a mixture of basic editor commands (see below) and text to be inserted.
• The usual 'C' escapes are available in names and macro definitions i.e. prepending the character '\' will cause the next character to be interpreted literally. Note that '\/' will still be interpreted as '/' - to escape a '/' in the text, use a double-slash '//'.
• Single-line comments can be inserted into the file by starting a line with the '<' character. Thus HTML tags on a line of their own will be ignored.
• For some unexplained reason it isn't possible to use the PowerEditPlugin on the PowerEditControls file.

The default control definitions for this installation may be viewed here.

Commands

The following commands are basic to the editor and can be used in button definitions:

Name	Description
/copy/	Copy the currently selected text to the internal cut buffer
/cut/	Cut the currently selected text to the internal cut buffer
/find/	Invoke the find dialog
/paste/	Paste the internal cut buffer. Will erase the current selection.
/undo/	Undo the last edit
/redo/	Repeats the last command executed (does not repeat typing)
/refind/	Repeat the last find
/replace/	Invoke the replace dialog
/rereplace/	Repeat the last replacement

Applet parameters

Parameter	Values	Description
useframe	"yes" or "no"	Whether to use a separate window or not
editboxwidth	Number of columns	If useframe=yes, then defines the number of columns width of the edit area. Ignored if useframe=no.
editboxheight	Number of rows	If useframe=yes, then defines the number of rows height of the edit area. Ignored if useframe=no.
server	URL	The URL that the editor will use to pass information back to the server.

It is a condition of use that any useful customisations are fed back to the TWiki:Plugins.PowerEditPluginDev page at https://twiki.org !

PowerEditPlugin Global Settings

Plugin settings are stored as preferences variables. To reference a plugin setting write %<plugin>_<setting>%, i.e. %POWEREDITPLUGIN_SHORTDESCRIPTION%

• One line description, is shown in the TextFormattingRules topic:
  • Set SHORTDESCRIPTION = Extend TWiki with a Java 1.1 Applet based text editor.

Installation Instructions

Note: You do not need to install anything on the browser to use this plugin. The following instructions are for the administrator who installs the plugin on the server where TWiki is running.

• Download the ZIP file from the Plugin web (see below). Contents:

  File:	Description:
  PowerEditPlugin.xml	Ant build file
  data/TWiki/PowerEditPlugin.txt	Plugin topic
  data/TWiki/PowerEditControls.txt	Sample control configuration
  templates/edit.power.tmpl	Specialised skin
  templates/applet.power.tmpl	Specialised skin
  pub/TWiki/PowerEditPlugin/poweredit.jar	JAR file
  lib/TWiki/Plugins/PowerEditPlugin/source.zip	Source and test code
  lib/TWiki/Plugins/PowerEditPlugin.pm	Plugin script

• Unzip PowerEditPlugin.zip in your twiki installation directory.

• A command to invoke the editor can by added to the normal topic view by putting the following line into your template/view.tmpl template, immediately after the line reading %EDITTOPIC%:

     %TMPL:P{"sep"}% <a href="%SCRIPTURLPATH%/edit%SCRIPTSUFFIX%/%WEB%/%TOPIC%?skin=power">PowerEdit</a>
     

Plugin Info

One Line Description:	Extended functionality editor
Plugin Author:	CrawfordCurrie
Plugin Version:	1.0
Change History:	1 Oct 2001: Initial version
	14 Mar 2003: Total rewrite
CPAN Dependencies:	none
Other Dependencies:	none
Perl Version:	5.0
Java Version:	1.1
Plugin Home:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/PowerEditPlugin
Feedback:	http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/PowerEditPluginDev

Related Topics: TWikiPreferences, TWikiPlugins

Known Problems

If you see a message in the text area suggesting that the topic is not locked for edit, try refreshing the page with the applet on (shift+Reload in Netscape, shift+F5 in IE). It's not really a problem, just a side-effect of the security checking in the applet.

Customisation

All the sources and unit tests are provided with the distribution, together with an Ant build file (see http://www.jakarta.org) should further customisation be required. The source.zip is shipped in the lib/TWiki/Plugins/PowerEditPlugin directory and when unzipped creates source, packages and test subdirectories. The src directory contains the PowerEdit applet sources, the test directory contains JUnit unit tests, and the packages directory contains the GNU 'regexp' packages, which is used by search and replace, and the kizna HTML parser.

Copyright

This code is a development of the Architectures and Systems Platforms group of Motorola Inc. and is protected by the following copyrights:

• Copyright (C) 2001-2003 Motorola. All Rights Reserved.

License

As required for the publication of all extensions to TWiki, this software is published under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details, published at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

-- TWiki:Main/CrawfordCurrie - 15 Mar 2003