Wednesday, August 20, 2008  

The most significant update in months was let loose on EditMe sites this evening. The primary area of enhancement was the editing interface, including a tabbed interface that combines several screens, an upgraded editor, a new Code editor, and more. Over the next few days, we'll be updating documentation and releasing some details for developers. Read on for a detailed account of what's new.

New Tabbed Editing Interface

The editing screen now contains a row of four tabs at the top: Content contains the familiar editor area. Properties contains the page properties, such as page security. Attachments contains an all new area to handle uploading and management of attachments for the page being edited. Versions contains the version history for the page being edited. Any of these tabs can be viewed within an editing session without having to save first, and without losing your work.

Content Editor Improvements

The rich text editor has been updated to provide better stability and performance. Some of the notable improvements include inline dialogs to prevent pop-up blocker confusion (and provide better performance), better handling of inline JavaScript, and a warning before the editor is closed if there are unsaved changes. Also, many minor bugs and browser issues have been resolved.

Note that the new editor does some things a little differently, so you may notice some minor formatting changes when you first save an existing page with the new editor. Simply update the formatting as needed and it should stay that way going forward.

Automatically Saved Drafts

The editing screen now automatically saves a draft of your work in the background while you are editing a page. The following points cover the details of this feature:

• A draft is saved about every 30 seconds if changes have been made since the last draft was saved and overwrites any previous draft you had saved for that page. A small yellow notification will display at the top of the editing screen whenever a draft is saved.
• A saved draft is not an actual page version and will not be displayed on the site until you click Save.
• To restore a draft if your browser crashes or is accidentally closed, simply edit the page and click OK when prompted to restore your draft.
• Once you save the page or confirm cancellation, the draft will be deleted.
• Drafts are only saved for 24 hours and they should not be depended upon as an alternate to saving your work.
• Finally, drafts are tied to your user name. You must be logged in as the user that saved a draft in order to restore it. You still have the option of saving to create a new version and immediately returning to the editing screen.If you're not logged in, a browser cookie is used for draft identification.

Streamlined Attachment Management

Attachment management has been moved from it's own screen to a tab on the editing screen. This means you can switch to the Attachments tab, upload a new image, and switch back to the Content tab and insert it without leaving your editing session. All attachment management for the current page can be done on this tab without reloading the screen and losing the state of the editor.

Code Editor

In addition to the rich text and plain text editor modes, a new "Code" editor mode now provides syntax highlighting for HTML, JavaScript and CSS source code. The code editor also includes line numbers, bracket completion, and support for the tab key.

Both the plain text and code editors will assume the size last set for rich text editor (which can be resized by dragging the bottom-right corner). This setting is stored in a cookie, so it will follow the last setting used on each computer.

Editing Form Usability Enhancements

The Content and Page Properties tabs have been reorganized for increased usability:

• The Mark Deleted check box has been moved from the Properties tab to the editing screen.
• The Plain Text editing mode check box has been removed from the Properties tab. Whichever editor mode is current when the page is saved will be used as the default when it is next edited.
• The properties tab is now available only to Administrator users. The only two options that were previously available to non-admins were the Mark Deleted check box and the Plain Text editing check box, and these have been moved to the Content tab.
• The Raw and MIME Type settings have been visually separated. Their close proximity made it seem like the MIME Type setting was only applied if the Raw box was checked, and this is not always the case.
• Properties are now saved automatically. Each property change will be automatically marked as a "minor edit".

Page Versions List

The Page Versions screen has been moved to a tab on the editing screen. The list is broken into pages of 25 to improve performance for pages with hundreds of versions.

Updated Comment Form

The comment form now displays the page content and previous comments below the comment editor.

Auto-population of Change Descriptions

The change description box is now populated with a simple description of what has changed. For example, if the content or title is changed, it will include "Title changed" or "Content updated". If a page property is changed, it will indicate which property was changed. Of course, this value can still be edited on the Content tab.

Questions, feedback or suggestions? Go to the Forums and let us know.