Tony Collen wrote:
So, I started playing with Dreamweaver, reading a couple PDFs to see exactly what we can add to DW to make doing things like creating CForms a lot simpler. I haven't done a ton yet, but from what I can see, I'm getting very excited.
You can hook into pretty much anything and create a menu using their XML format:
<menu name="C_ocoon" id="cocoon-2.2">
<menuitem name="C_Form Editor" enabled="true" command="dw.toggleFloater('cocoon')" id=""/>
<menuitem name="CForm _Bindings" enabled="true" command="" id=""/>
<menuitem name="_Pipeline Editor" enabled="true" command="" id=""/>
</menu>
Produces the following menu: http://manero.org/images/dw-menu.gif
The command attribute is simply a JavaScript command to do something. As you can see, I toggle the floater named "cocoon" which is what opens the following:
http://manero.org/images/dw-floater.gif
The definition of the floaters (and the other panels) is just HTML. All you basically do it write up a form, code a little bit of JavaScript and pow, instant functionality. You can even define multiple floaters and tab them together. Very useful, and exciting.
Ideally, we would have something for ceating a basic CForms definition, and then create new elements in the document DOM.
Sylvain mentioned he did some stuff using custom tags, and it looks like we can easily create a tag library for CForms.
So my question is: what would people want to see in a GUI CForms editor?
Obviously we have to not only edit the form instance, but also the form template as well. Still not sure how we'd handle the templates yet.. perhaps once I start playing with it a little more, it will come to me.
There's an absolute ton of API reference for DW out there. I'm surprised at how much customizability DW actually has. You can even go so far as to define your own server model. Imagine being able to connect to a Cocoon server and remotely edit forms, Flowscript, etc, all from the comfort of Dreamweaver.
Thanks Tony for digging into this. It seems to be a very promising way! :-)
(I will comment on the details in a separate mail as soon as I have enough time thinking more about this!)
I know, Dreamweaver is commercial but is there any way putting your work into an opensource CVS/SVN?
-- Reinhard
