I'm thinking of starting work on a box content editor that would have an edit link that opens a forms-based editor where the content of the form fields are stored in a parallel mysql database. The idea is not at all fleshed out, but I'm wondering if it fits with this general topic...and if so do people here have thoughts about the idea.
I'm planning to make this work for specific content boxes in a wiki I'm running, where we'd like structured content from users as well as freetext. The basic idea so far is to delimit the boxes of interest with some kind of tag, use that to pull the box in question out of the page text using a regex, and replace it with the updated content generated by a forms page. Has this already been done?
A potential side benefit is to make tables and boxes easier to populate for new users who are intimidated by the wiki markup in those areas, which tends to be a bit more complex than elsewhere on the pages.
Jim Hu
On Jan 22, 2007, at 8:38 AM, Rob Church wrote:
On 22/01/07, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
I once posted the idea (which, of course, was ignored;-) to store the names and values of variables passed to templates from articles in a SQL table. If you write {{xyz|a=1|b=2}} in article BLA and save, it
I had something along the same lines checked into an experimental branch; the user would insert metadata tags, and these would be dealt with in a similar manner to link updates:
[[Metadata:People|birth=1980]] etc.
It works on a "subject", "name" and "value" triplet concept - subjects group similar pieces of data, the name and value are self-evident. This was adapted from an idea Zocky had on IRC, which I hastily implemented.
It's in the repo, but incomplete - likely missing the upgraders and table definitions, and there's no interface for directly manipulating data outside of pages, nor any way of querying it at present.
Rob Church
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===================================== Jim Hu Associate Professor Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics 2128 TAMU Texas A&M Univ. College Station, TX 77843-2128 979-862-4054