|
|
|
specific solutions to the general templating problem
Sunday, September 24 2017
Today Gretchen was feeling healthy enough today not only to take the dogs on the short loop (via the Chamomile Headwaters Trail) but also to work most of her Sunday shift at the Golden Notebook in Woodstock. She began at 1:00pm instead of her customary 11:00am, but worked until closing time, and Neville (also recently-hospitalized!) was there with her too. Normally Neville regards the shift at the bookstore as real work (all that love and adoration is exhausting!), but Gretchen said that today he seemed delighted to be back after his several-week hiatus.
Meanwhile, I continued work on the tinyMCE templating project. The system allows an admin to specify an arbitrary form (in JSON, which is almost human-readable) as well as a template (usually HTML with tokens) so that later a user can fill out the form and have the contents populate the template at the various tokens. Many of the stock "buttons" in tinyMCE are actually specific solutions to the general templating problem. For this reason, it seemed useful to be able to trigger some of the templates in my system with tinyMCE menu options or even toolbar buttons. So, after figuring out how to pass template IDs to the template popup, I implemented a system allowing an admin to specify whether and how (what icon to use, what keyboard shortcut, etc.) a specific template can have its button added to the tinyMCE toobar. Such tight integration between a complicated frontend tool like tinyMCE and a database allows all sorts of amazing capabilities, and I found the work exhilarating in a way that I haven't in quite some time.
Monarch butterflies seem to be hitting our hydrangeas near the front door. I don't normally see them here in this ecological desert, so perhaps they're just migrating through. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170924 feedback
previous | next |
