Open source web editing

While reading the thread discussing Macromedia’s Contribute over on 37signals I realised something: the web could really do with an open source Contribute style application. Editing full documents is best done in an application—there’s only so much you can do with browser based editing tools (even if you take advantage of IE’s contendEditable or use Flash to build an editor applet). When people are using Word they hit Ctrl+S to instantly save what they working on—show me a browser based editor with the same functionality.

Then it hit me. The open source community already has the beginnings of a desktop WYSIWYG content editing application in Mozilla’s Composer. Composer is often overlooked, but the few times I have tried it it has proved to be a remarkably powerful piece of software. Imagine an open source project inspired by Contribute, based on Composer but with support for XML-RPC and SOAP in addition to FTP (the Mozilla code base has libraries for all 3). CMS vendors could use it to build powerful, cross-platform editing applications for their existing systems, bloggers could use it to update their blogs (through support for something like the MetaWeblog API, schools and colleges could use the FTP version to encourage non technical users to update sites simply (as Contribute does now).

Now if only I knew XUL...

Update: Whaddya know, there’s even a document on embedding the editor right there on the Composer site.

Posted 13th November 2002 at 10:24 pm

6 comments

> right there on the Composter site. Is that a slip of the fingers or a nasty little joke? :-)
Jan! - 14th November 2002 09:48 - #
That would be a typo :) Fixed now.
Simon Willison - 14th November 2002 12:15 - #
Here's a question: when I come to your site sometimes I see (in the left hand nav) a list of blogs I read with a limited number of sites, and sometimes I see a longer list, sorted as to when they were last updated. I like the sorted list, but I often can't find it. What is that?
PeterV - 14th November 2002 15:15 - #
That's a joint problem with blo.gs and my code. Every now and then (increasingly often recently) blo.gs isn't available, and when my script goes to download the latest XML file from it it fails. I should put in some logic so it keeps the old version but I haven't got round to it yet. I might do that now as the problem seems to be getting more common :/
Simon Willison - 14th November 2002 21:49 - #
Our customer edits their corporate website using Composer, saves to a live staging server (i.e. identical to the public one), and we sync edits to make it live. How do they not screw up the page layout? The site is served using Zope, and they edit Zope Page Templates. Only the "slots" marked in the source is editable. The rest of the page is dynamically generated. http://zopefish.weblogs.com/discuss/msgReader$360? mode=day
Jean Jordaan - 15th November 2002 20:19 - #
After some considerable testing of Contribute I have to come to the conclusion that it is too awkward for most computer illiterate clients to use. It is a 'thick' client that is quite bandwidth intensive. I think it will be successful but I think wysiwyg editing of whole pages is one of those things that seems attractive until you try to do anything vaguely complex whilst retaining control over layout. One thing I saw recently was www.xopus.org which blew me away... This is getting someway towards what a full wysiwyg page editor should be. The other option is to have a well written cms where you edit your page 'bits' with no reference to what the full page looks like.. After all, with the fuss about separation of content and style, why is everyone lauding the recombination of the two?
Tim Parkin - 16th November 2002 18:22 - #

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Open source web editing

6 comments