EditChapterPlugin

An easy section editing facility

Description

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This plugin implements a simple section editing feature comparable to the one available for MediaWiki. It adds link urls to headings so that users can edit the section below. Edit links are enabeld only for those users that have edit access. Edit links are hidden unless you hover with the mouse pointer over them and then displays an icon, defaulting to a pencil .

Once installed, the plugin automatically enables sectional editing without any further provisions. Note, that it will only detect headings created using TML (topic markup language), that is writing ---++ heading and the like. It is not sensitive to normal HTML-markup, so it does not add an edit link to normal <h2>headings</h2>.

Sections might be included into the current topic using INCLUDE. The edit link will be adjusted approriately, allowing to edit the correct target topic and then redirect back to the current topic it has been included to.

Previous work

There are a couple of other plugins that try to implement a section editing feature, along with some other more exotic features. The first plugin of that kind was TWiki:Plugins/SectionalEditPlugin. Later on, its functionality was extended to process sections in a broader sense in the TWiki:Plugins/MultiEditPlugin. By the time of this writing both plugins were about to be merged again into one TWiki:Plugins/EditSectionPlugin. These three plugins all depend on an extra package called TWiki:Plugins/EditContrib which factors out common code. In addition EditContrib contains a patch to the core engine, available for TWiki-4.0 and TWiki-4.1.x only. All these plugins are currently non-functional.

While first looking at the code of SectionalEditPlugin, it was clear very soon, that it would be better to start from scratch and remove some features for the sake of a cleaner implementation, that is in sync with recent developments, i.e. PatternSkin, NatSkin and NatEditContrib in this area.

The other substantial difference between SectionalEditPlugin and EditChapterPlugin is that while the former introduces additional code to save an isolated subsection back into the topic, the latter always saves complete topics, despite the fact that only part of it is editable.

Configuration

There are a couple of preference variables to influence how and which headings are processed:

Name	Description	Default
EDITCHAPTERPLUGIN_ENABLED	variable to enable/disable the EditChapterPlugin	on
EDITCHAPTERPLUGIN_EDITLABELFORMAT	full format string to render the detected heading of a chapter	<span class="ecpHeading">$anchor</a>$heading<a class="ecpEdit" href="$url" title="Edit this chapter">$img</a></span>
EDITCHAPTERPLUGIN_EDITIMG	icon to be used in the edit link	<img src="%$nopPUBURLPATH%/%SYSTEMWEB%/EditChapterPlugin/uweb-g.gif" height="16" width="16" border="0" />
EDITCHAPTERPLUGIN_MAXDEPTH	max depth of headings to edit	6
EDITCHAPTERPLUGIN_MINDEPTH	min depth of heading to edit the sections, 1=h1, 2=h2, 3=...	1

Syntax

ENABLEEDITCHAPTER, DISABLEEDITCHAPTER

In addition to enable/disable the plugin using the EDITCHAPTERPLUGIN_ENABLE preference variable, it can also be enabled disabled using the %ENABLEEDITCHAPTER% / %DISABLEEDITCHAPTER% tags.

EXTRACTCHAPTER

Dedicated chapters of a topic can be extracted using the %EXTRACTCHAPTER{}% tag. it takes the following parameters:

Name	Description	Default
topic	target topic name to extract the chapter from	%BASETOPIC%
web	target web name	%BASEWEB%
nr	specify a single chapter to be extracted
from	specify first chapter to be extracted, use to to specify the last chapter	0
to	specify last chapter to be extracted, mostly used together with from	9999999
before	specify to extract all chapters before the given one
after	specify to extract all chapters after the given one
encode	enable/disable entity encoding, used when embeding into an HTML input element	on

Example:

<textarea style="display:none">
  %EXTRACTCHAPTER{before="1"}%
</textarea>
<textarea>
  %EXTRACTCHAPTER{nr="1" encode="on"}%
</textarea>
<textarea style="display:none">
  %EXTRACTCHAPTER{after="1}%
</textarea>

See the edit.chapter.tmpl for a real-world example, used as a cover to the standard edit templates, thus hooking in section editing into the standard editing process.

Limitations

For the purpose of simplicity a couple of shortcomings have to be accepted.

1. parametrized includes: the plugin does not know anything about parametrized includes, that is it won't work as expected if a topic includes text from a named section of another topic using %INCLUDE{"TargetTopic" section="onlythis"}%.
2. wysiwyg editor: it currently does not work work together with Foswiki:Extensions/WysiwygPlugin
3. explicit sectioning: users can't specify any other section to be editable in isolation (e.g. using some <section> ... </section> markup) other than by giving the respective section a heading.
4. jQuery: the EditChapterPlugin depends on the JQueryPlugin, used to hook into the edit interface. You may be facing an increased javascript download overhead in your html pages as you are already using Foswiki:Extensions/BehavourContrib, Foswiki:Extensions/TwistyContrib and Foswiki:Extensions/TwistyPlugin. Consider uninstalling these three and replace them with Foswiki:Extensions/JQueryTwistyPlugin. You should have installed JQueryPlugin anyway already. Last not least you get less javascript but more features.

Installation Instructions

You do not need to install anything in the browser to use this extension. The following instructions are for the administrator who installs the extension on the server.

Open configure, and open the "Extensions" section. Use "Find More Extensions" to get a list of available extensions. Select "Install".

If you have any problems, or if the extension isn't available in configure, then you can still install manually from the command-line. See http://foswiki.org/Support/ManuallyInstallingExtensions for more help.

Plugin Info

Many thanks to the following sponsors for supporting this work:

• TecDoc Informations System GmbH

Plugin Author(s):	Michael Daum
Copyright ©:	2008-2009, Michael Daum http://michaeldaumconsulting.com
License:	GPL (GNU General Public License)
Plugin Version:	v1.21
Change History:
08 Jan 2009:	certified for foswiki/compat
26 Nov 2008:	replaced the uggly universal edit button with a nice pencil
26 Jun 2008:	new universal edit button
29 Apr 2008:	removed "literal" hack again; removed check for body_text context; only the icon is clickable - was all of the heading before
13 Mar 2008:	add <literal> ... </literal> for TWiki engines before 4.2
14 Feb 2008:	have a little space in the default heading format to let TopicMarkup do its job; added support for legacy heading markup like --------#####
05 Feb 2008:	compatibility with old PatternSkin versions
03 Jan 2008:	initial release
Dependencies:	Name Version Description TWiki::Plugins::JQueryPlugin >=0.4 Required.
Plugin Home:	Foswiki:Extensions/EditChapterPlugin
Feedback:	Foswiki:Extensions/EditChapterPluginDev