jEditable inline content editing

The jEditable module provides integration between Drupal's CCK module and the excellent jQuery plugin, jEditable. It is implemented as a CCK formatter, which makes inline editing possible through regular node displays, Panels, Views, or anywhere else you can place a CCK field.

Currently supported features are "click to edit" functions for text fields, number fields, date fields, node reference fields and workflow transitions.

In all cases these are plain text fields and do not support much in the way of validation and filtering. Text fields are run through check_plain and date fields are additionally run through php's strtotime() function which allows for rather flexible date inputs. The module does check that a user has access to update the node or to make the workflow change, but it can be that users who have the "use jeditable" permission will run into cases where they have the form but get access denied messages when trying to update. This is up to the implementer to make sure that the jeditable formatters show up in the right place.

WYSIWYG support is not available and probably will not be in the Drupal 6 version, but perhaps will be for a Drupal 7 release.

So what is this good for? Well, I use it on a site with a large amount of content which must be regularly updated by administrators. For them it provides a very quick and easy way to update the things they need to change without having to edit the view. It uses a great deal of node references, text and numbers, so the limitations of this module are not a problem.

What is the difference between this and editablefields? Well, the approach is rather different, so it depends on what you're looking for. This module is extremely light weight, and so it's very fast. Editablefields makes an ajax call to the server to get the correct cck widget for editing the field, which means it's much more flexible. However, if you're editing a lot of content, it can slow down the page and it takes time for each click. jEditable uses the approach that you only get a textfield or textarea without caring what it's for or what will go into it. This means the javascript can immediately load the form which makes it very responsive. This makes it great if you're dealing with plain text fields, but will make it inappropriate if you're trying to do anything more robust.

Please see the README.txt file for installation instructions and instructions on using the workflow integration.

Final note: This module opens up a big can of worms as far as feature requests. Please go ahead and place them all in the issue queue, but inline editing is a complicated topic in Drupal and this module is not going to be suited to everyone. However, if it does meet your needs, please let me know and I hope you enjoy it!

Module developed by Ingram Innovation

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