907299 - [MVP] Support a collection of reusable building blocks in wiki editing

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Editing, enhancement)

Description

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

What problems would this solve?
===============================
Certain patterns of markup are common and reused on many pages. It would be handy to have an in-editor list of these patterns to easily drop them into a page being edited

Who would use this?
===================
Writers, editors

What would users see?
=====================
Probably as a button in CKEditor, which would summon up a dropdown selector. The selector would be populated from titles found in a special pre-configured section of the site, the subpages of which would each provide a reusable markup block.

What would users do? What would happen as a result?
===================================================
When one of the reusable blocks is selected, the markup will be inserted at the cursor position in the editor. 

This, and the list of blocks, can probably be fetched via AJAX using the wiki API

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================
It's important to note one block per wiki page in this reusable blocks section. That makes it easier to edit & manage each of them.

Comment 1

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

FWIW, this could be considered as either a cousin to or a special case of bug 907294, depending on how we do it.

Comment 2

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

It's also worth noting that we could do this kind of thing with KumaScript templates. But, there are probably cases where copying & pasting the markup from a canned example is better than executing a macro.

Comment 3

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

(In reply to Les Orchard [:lorchard] from comment #2)
> It's also worth noting that we could do this kind of thing with KumaScript
> templates. But, there are probably cases where copying & pasting the markup
> from a canned example is better than executing a macro.

Using macros requires some understanding of the concept of macros, and is more sensitive to syntax and other issues. Being able to insert template blocks of HTML is probably less fragile, and is pretty clearly more user-friendly.

Comment 4

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

Of course, we also would want to be able to use KumaScript macros in these blocks, to make use of various automation techniques, etc. Boy howdy, I'm looking forward to this.

Comment 6

[ali spivak]

bumping to P1 for post-redesign.

Comment 7

[Māris Fogels [:mars] (please needinfo)]

This is a feature, not a bug, so I'm moving it out of P1.

Comment 8

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

At some point we may want to simplify the Editing UI, but I'm neither sure this will be the way, nor if it will happen in the next few years: we have so many other things to do before.

Closing this.