Wiki-like editing

[haumacher]

When creating/editing pages and posts, the current workflow looks like the following:

• Start the JBake server for previewing the site in a browser
• Open the page in an editor
• Apply the changes and save the file
• Start baking the site by invoking the JBake main application
• Reload the browser and review the result
• Switch back to the editor and continue editing the page.

Especially for fine-tuning edits, the turnaround time of this process is suboptimal. Additionally, since such many tools are involved (editor, JBake main, JBake server, browser and potentially a file system explorer) creating/maintaining sites with JBake is only possible for "techies".

Instead, I would appreciate a workflow that only involves the JBake server and a browser. The workflow should then look like the following:

• Start a JBake Wiki-Server
• Open the page to edit in the browser
• Press an "Edit" or "Create" button on the page.
• Apply the change in an text area within the browser
• Press "Save" and directly see the change rendered in the browser.

For editing the site, this does not require switching between different desktop applications, everything is possible within the browser. Since the rendered result is directly shown as result of the "Save" action, the turnaround time dramatically decreases (especially because no new rendering/baking VM must be started).

If the deployment/update process of the static result to the target server could also be included into the wiki UI, creating or at least maintaining JBake sites may become possible even for normal humans, too.

I started improving JBake in this direction on the wikibake branch of my haumacher/jbake fork.

[jonbullock]

Sounds interesting... how far have you got with it?

There are plans for a watch mode (probably as part of the server mode) that will take advantage of the incremental rendering feature... but this won't solve the creation of new content.

[haumacher]

Sorry for the long delay. I've got a working prototype of the described functionality on my wikibake branch. In the current version however, the templates must cooperate to achieve the wiki mode rendering by adding the wiki menu to the page when the page is served by the JBake server. The wiki menu provides buttons for switching to edit mode, creating a new page and saving the edited content.

I refactored the JBake server in a way that it renders pages on demand. For each page request by the browser, the page is created from its template and directly served without saving the generated result to disk. In this mode, a special variable wikibake is provided to the page templates that allows to decide, whether the page is served by the JBake server (wikibake = true), or whether the page is rendered in a regular bake operation (wikibake = false). This allows the template to show the wiki menu for online rendering only.

I also experimented with incremental rendering, but this does not produce the expected results in general. In my site example, I've got a menu structure, where pages are cross-linked. Since this menu structure is de-facto part of every page, adding a new page requires re-generating all pages. The same holds for deleting a page or renaming a page title. During developing a site, it's therefore better baking pages on demand. This is also extremely fast, because the templates are already loaded.

Here is an example of a page in view mode, where you can see the wiki menu embedded in the page:

When activating edit mode, the pages is rendered as follows:

The screenshots are taken from my project creating a homepage for a local elementary school. The sources with wikibake-prepared templates can be found here: uvd-schule.

[jonbullock]

Thanks for the overview, I'll leave this open for the time being to remind me to come back to this as it relates to other ideas I've been thinking about recently.

[jonbullock]

@haumacher I'd like to discuss this further with you if you're still interested?