Offline text editor for Drupal docs [#996040]

This is something for Santa's wishlist...

I've been thinking there must be at least a few cross-platform open source editing tools that are capable of parsing html from a given URL so I'm wondering if it wouldn't be possible to extend or customize one of them just a little to become a hugely useful power tool for working with the Drupal docs. Here's how it would work:

- In the text editor, the user provides the edit url of a node (eg http://drupal.org/node/176052/edit)
- The text editor sucks in the HTML from that address, parses it to isolate the text in the node body field and presents it to the user for editing.
- The user then exploits all the power of the tool (code coloring, macros, search and replace, drag and drop, etc) to perform his or her edits.
- The user clicks Save and is prompted for the log message.
- The text editor checks the edit history to make sure noone else has edited the page in the interim, and pushes the content back to drupal.org as if it was a normal browser-based edit.

I'm guessing that nothing on d.o would need change and that an existing tool like Eclipse could be extended a little bit to do what's needed. I'm also wondering if someone somewhere hasn't already done something similar as it would seem like an amazingly useful tool for many Drupal (and WordPress etc.) .

Only a tiny number of people would probably use something like this, but they would be your power users who could really boost their productivity.

Comments

Comment #1

LeeHunter CreditAttribution: LeeHunter commented 12 December 2010 at 10:10

Component:

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Comment #2

LeeHunter CreditAttribution: LeeHunter commented 12 December 2010 at 11:58

I forgot to mention the most important part which is why you need this when you could just copy and paste the node body contents into your favorite editor.

The real power would come when you can also slurp up a whole section of the docs (either through the book structure, the proposed new mapping capability or through views).

You could then do your search and replace over many pages and you could more easily refactor content (e.g you could move a chunk from one page to another or even to break down a long page into a number of chunks some of which are made into new pages which are fed back to d.o. the same way.

Comment #3

arianek CreditAttribution: arianek commented 13 December 2010 at 03:00

this isn't really what you're describing, but in the interim, you might want to check out http://beautifymydocs.com which chrisshattuck built and launched earlier this year.