[WM] Re: Textile & Is WebMake Alive?

[Wes Meltzer]

I thought about the question of Textile's licensing, and at least 
according to Dean Allen's license 
(http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/license.html) we'd have to get 
his permission to distribute a Textile module for WebMake.

There is, if you want to see how it would be possible to implement 
Textile in Perl (Dean's is PHP), a module for Movable Type (MT-Textile, 
by Brad Choate; http://http://www.bradchoate.com/past/001653.php for 
new syntax) which provides essentially the functionality we'd be trying 
to provide in WebMake for MT. Brad's version is open-sourced, although 
the license only appears in his Zip package, and we could make a 
derivative of that.

It wouldn't be that hard to take some inspiration from Textile, I 
think, for EtText either. A great example of this is the quote 
prettifying, say, which is just a Perl hack; and a NEW new link style 
for EtText could be done exactly like Textile's. But there are some 
things I really like, like the ability to easily construct tables 
without having to use a <csvtable />-alike and the block-level tags 
('hn.' etc.), which explains why I asked for a Textile2HTML converter.

Justin, I really like the WM templating system, and that's why I 
switched over from Genpage (yaay) about six months ago, so I'd hate to 
see that go away. I mean, yes, TTK is pretty well-done, but the WM 
templating system is really elegant and there are some things that just 
make sense there.

Anyway. A list of things I'd like to see, eventually, since you asked:

	* If nothing else, have EtText output validating XHTML.

	* Either get better, newer, more flexible ET syntax or eventually port 
over Textile module to WebMake

	* Documentation on how to do a ${all_files}, which I found through 
persistent Google searching, or maybe just a ${WebMake.All_Files} that 
could be used in an out helper.

	* The ability to set an output directory.

	* Better end-user editing support in webmake.cgi
		- Edit metadata included in <metatable /> for individual content 
items IN content editing window/realm
		- More flexible MD editing (not limited to just pre-defined MD fields)
		- Edit FOR loop for file-output selecting (or implement ${all_files})

There. I think that's enough for the moment.

Wes :wm

On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 20:29:28 +0100 (IST), Justin Mason wrote:
> In terms of new stuff -- Textile support would be nifty (and probably 
> easy enough if 
> the Textile code is open-source-licensed and a perl module) -- 
> although I bet we 
> could just copy the good ideas into EtText anyway ;)
> 
> EtText generating proper XHTML would definitely be a good thing -- 
> and probably 
> not too hard.
> 
> And I agree, some of the syntax features of EtText are annoying me now.  In 
> particular the "new" link style I added just makes no sense. doh.
> 
> I haven't given a whole lot of thought to fixing this, so feel free 
> to pitch in!
> 
> Another thing I was hoping to do, if I ever got the tuits, would be 
> to replace the 
> current templating system in WM with one based on Template Toolkit; 
> TTK is a better 
> system in terms of scriptable stuff like if/while, and it's more 
> widely used, so hopefully 
> less buggy ;).  However the WM templating has some very handy features like 
> dependency and metadata support, multiple templates in one file, 
> distinction 
> between content and templates, so some merging would have to be 
> done.   So this 
> is definitely one thing on the "big jobs if I get the chance" list.
ithildin at teleport.com
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