[pmwiki-users] Redesigning the edit page

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 03:25:39PM -0400, Martin Fick wrote:
> What if we could make the user more able to configure his
> editing style as opposed to exposing everything with a
> button?  

Allowing individual preferences is indeed a goal I have, however
designing that interface (and doing it properly so that
recipe authors and others can hook into it) is going to
be a fair amount of work.  Ideally, I suspect people will
want a form-based interface with checkboxes and pulldown
forms and the like.  More realistically for the short term,
it could consist of a simple wiki page (per-author) with 
"property=value" pairs on it that the author can edit.
Keeping those pages up-to-date with new feature options
would be a real pain (it's the same sort of problem that
exists for the XLPages when new strings are defined and
need to be added to each language's XLPage).

> 1) I always want to be able to see what the page currently
>   looks like while editing and think that hitting preview
>   the first time is simply a waste of time.  I would find
>   it usefull to have the preview as a checkbox that could
>   be preset by a cookie or something. 

Site administrators can configure the system so that
a preview appears even on the first edit.  However, if
preview is a checkbox, how would someone get a new preview
of their edits without actually saving the page?  (Keep in
mind that the primary purpose of preview is to be able to
see what a page will look like without making an entry into
the page history.)

> 3) As you are trying to accomplish with the 'Continue
>   editing after save' box, I would prefer to have that be
>   the default 'Save' and simply have an 'Exit' or 'Done' 
>   button (which does not have to save, it could prompt if
>   somehting were changed).
>
> Maybe we could attach a user edit template to users'
> profiles?  Profiles.<User>-EditForm.  Users could then 
> customize their edit page.

Keep in mind that unless the interface is made very simple,
customizing the edit page itself is likely to be out of the 
skill set of many authors.

Pm