On 5/3/06, Patrick Aljord patcito@gmail.com wrote:
I want to do it in Qt/C++.
Good choice.
The main functionalities will be the same as your perl script:
- save
- save & continue
- diff
- preview
- cancel
Make sure you test how the app reacts in case of edit conflicts, I'm not sure the current script handles them properly. Also check the caching behavior. The current script may view out of date images, for instance, after saving (it sometimes does, sometimes doesn't, probably a race condition). A MediaWiki URL that ends with &action=purge should override all caching.
It might also be nice to have an additional method of saving to the server, simply by saving the file itself from the application. To do this, you would have to monitor changes to the data. This should be optional and quick to enable/disable from the UI (hotkey or visible checkbox). Check out http://www.zope.org/Members/Caseman/ExternalEditor/ - this is a similar feature in Zope. The zopeedit file contains the helper application, written in Python. It follows a different protocol than MediaWiki, but may provide some inspiration.
Since the helper application will have to be capable of uploading files, adding some additional MediaWiki upload functionality would be a nice way to make the project a little larger. This would be an interesting alternative to your other SoC application for improving the upload process. There are currently a few batch upload utilities, but the only cross-platform tool I've seen is written in Java and rather slow.
Having the upload functionality in there would also be a good way to get more people to install the tool. In the long run, it could be enriched with even more client-side functionality such as simple bot tasks.
- ability to save sessions to remember which documents you were working on
- select session upon start
Not sure this is very useful, since you're typically going to launch the editor from a wiki when you have a need for it.
Erik