[FM Discuss] New feature thanks to Source Fabric, Tuukka Hastrup and of course Aco :)

[adam hyde]

hi,

A quick email about some very nice features that have been just added to 
booki code base and consequently to FLOSS Manuals WRITE. They are new to 
booki and have not been pushed to www.booki.cc yet so FM is the first to 
try them :)

First a note about how these happened. Essentially Source Fabric 
approached us because they wanted three features in FM to support the 
dev of their manuals - I will let Micz from SF tell you about those 
plans when he is ready as they are pretty interesting.

They then sponsored Tuukka Hastrup (who did the localisation plugin for 
Booki) to do the development on a rather tight time frame. Aco was there 
to guide the dev, give advice and steer the ship (and do the final merge).

All in all it ran pretty smoothly and its the first time we have had 
some features sponsored in this way. We have had bigger developments 
supported before, notably by Internews, but this was of a different type 
- essentially picking off three shorter development ideas for 
implementation and I think it worked pretty well.

So big thanks to Source Fabric for doing this, I would *really* like to 
see more of this kind of thing happen and its great they stepped up and 
gave it a go. Also thanks to Tuukka for doing a great job on the 
features, and Aco for guiding the ship...

ok, so the features...we have three...the first allows you to hide a 
manual. If you go to 'my manuals' you will see all the manual you have 
created. You can choose to hide a manual now by clicking 'hide from 
others'. This will take the book off the radar (it will not appear 
anywhere in Booki) abut you can still distribute the direct URL if you 
want others to work on it. This means you can take manuals out of the 
general FM circulation and work on them privately. Why would you want to 
do this? Well, there are good reasons and I am hoping Micz will write to 
say why he thinks this is interesting...

Next...Clone Manual. You can now copy an entire manual to play on it as 
you please. You also do this in 'my manuals' and you do it by chooing 
'Import Booki' from the form at the bottom of the page. You must enter 
in the full URL of the book (sans 'edit'). For example this would work:
http://booki.flossmanuals.net/wordpress/
and this would work:
http://booki.flossmanuals.net/wordpress

but this would not:
http://booki.flossmanuals.net/wordpress/edit/

nor would this:
wordpress

We will refine the GUI over time. However if you clone a manual you can 
then do with it as you wish...what is also good about this is that you 
can clone a book from *any* booki install (eg from booki.cc to FM)...now 
thats not necessrily a good idea for FM - we dont want books from 
booki.cc about vietnamese poetry or Adams German Lessons in FM but you 
can see where this is going...booki content is becoming 
distributable...this is getting close to being a very interesting 
distributed (avoiding the term 'decentralised' for now) free content 
system....going a slight step toward the 'federated network software' 
ideas being set forth by status.net and friends...

Ok...and feature number three...well...for a while, infact since FM 
started pretty much, we have had REMIX for remixing existing manuals. 
This is a cool feature and whenever I demo it people love it. However, 
the remixes were rather static - you could only remix and output to PDF 
or templated HTML. You could not change the content. Now we have taken 
that step towards real remixable content in the form of an 'import 
chapter' feature on the edit page of all manuals.

With this you can import a chapter from a manual into the manual you are 
working on. its *very* easy to use and it carries all the modification 
information and the history and attachments etc with it...then you can 
rename the chapter, put it i the TOC, edit it etc and export the entire 
manual at your will in the normal way...this is very exciting. It might 
seem like a small feature but I think it has absolutely enormous 
potential...

check out also the nice way that Tuukka implemented it...it has a auto 
complete form on the book name and the chapter name so u dont have to 
work it all out yourself :)

so...very cool stuff. All built on this beautiful framework that Aco has 
been slaving over, and all courtesy of Source Fabric and the hard work 
of Tuukka and Aco...

cool ey what


adam
(send bug reports to http://booki-dev.flossmanuals.net)