Front end content editing

Yes! There should be specific formats for just about everything, to make new ideas for parsing and otherwise dealing with snippets, chunks, TVs, etc etc possible.

By the way, using the Properties tab for snippets is just plain ugly! when one property is entered and saved, it should automatically empty the entry field for adding another one, instead of having this long string disappearing off the end of a single input field. Clicking on the name of an existing property would load it into the entry field for editing. As it is, if you have half a dozen properties, you have to dig through the whole string just to edit one of the properties. Ouch.

Quote from: sottwell at Jul 29, 2005, 11:02 AM

By the way, using the Properties tab for snippets is just plain ugly!  when one property is entered and saved, it should automatically empty the entry field for adding another one, instead of having this long string disappearing off the end of a single input field.  Clicking on the name of an existing property would load it into the entry field for editing.  As it is, if you have half a dozen properties, you have to dig through the whole string just to edit one of the properties.  Ouch.

Hi Susan

This will be much easier in TP4

Hi Adam,

Any word on the fixes for the frontend editing?

Hey,

I posted "version 3" a while ago (in a different thread). But since you mention it I realize that I had forgotten about the richtext option. So I just posted a version 4.

Here’s a link to the thread
Adding an edit button on every page

If you want me to work on turning it into a module for TP4 I’d be happy to see what I can do, but I may need to have you add in another plugin event or two.

I know I’m late to the party on this one but it’s something near and dear to my heart since any CMS I work on or consider for a project has this as a feature. Some thoughts:

- sounds like it’s been decided to make this a plugin, I would strongly encourage it as a core feature, it is a bullet point on any major mid-size CMS
- was a method determined for editing "invisible" elements? Not just those that may be in the HEAD like META tags but things such as hidden/background images or text that would not be displayed anywhere. One way of handling this is having a tag and associated text to block out these elements. Not having seen this feature working in MODx I don’t know what is used to denote an editable piece of content on the front end, I will use a pencil for exampe. So you have your [*backgroundimage*] TV that gets exposed to the front end and at the top of the template you might have:

[*START front end block*]
[*backgroundimage:edit*]
<strong>CLICK TO EDIT the background image</strong>
[*END front end block*]

This only appears when the user is in front end editing mode. I hope you get the idea, it is great because you can stuff all kinds of useful info for non-technical editors in there. I hope I’m not too late to the discussion

Not too late at all. We havn’t even incorporated the frontend editing into a release yet.

About the plugin vs. core decision. There was a lot of talk with opinions on both sides but in the end it was decided that we would get the best of both worlds and make it a core plugin. It’s planned that it will be a plugin but be distributed with the default installation. So it will still be a "core" feature event though it won’t be hard coded into the core.

As far as editing "hidden" TVs we’ve thought about that too. At this point I’m thinking it would be easiest to have a simple snippet that would output a "header" with links to edit all of the TVs on the page. This should be a simple solution and won’t require any modifications to the existing frontend editing code.

One other thing I’d like to do in the future is add support for Published, Show in Menu, Menu Index, Searchable, etc. Right now it’s just TVs, pagetitle, longtitle, description and content.

Thanks for your great ideas. I think we’ll end up with a great solution by the next release.

Quote from: aNoble at Aug 08, 2005, 09:02 PM

If you want me to work on turning it into a module for TP4 I’d be happy to see what I can do, but I may need to have you add in another plugin event or two.

Sounds great. Later on this week I’ll add the new plugin event (OnParseDocument) so you can start working on the plugin. If you need any help I can see what I can do to help you get started.

It’s getting late and I’m going to have to be hitting the sack. But tomorrow I’ll try to give the plugin and or module idea a good look and let you know exactly what I think I’ll need in the core.

Currently, because of some caching issues, I think I’ll need at least two plugin events: onParseDocument (as you mentioned) and onPreRender. I think everything else I should be able to take care of, but I’ll look into it to make sure.

Thanks for the help.

Yes, the OnWebPagePrerender event already exist

Great! Sounds like we’re headed in the right direction.