Edit Notes

[AndrewMagliozzi]

Allow users to collaboratively edit each others' notes and study guides.

We must find an open source option for doing this easily. It should ideally use markdown. Questions:

• Can we convert our HTML to markdown (and back) easily?
• How will we deal with edit history and diff-ing?
• What existing open source tools can help with this?

Some potential open source options for us to consider:

• Etherpad and its many plugins
• EpicEditor
• Hallo and the code here
• StackEdit and the code here
• Laverna
• Others?

One closed source option might also be:

• The Draft API for diffs, forks, and edit history

[AndrewMagliozzi]

StackEdit seems awesome for these reasons:

• Convert HTML to Markdown
• Edit existing Markdown documents from Google Drive
• LaTeX mathematical expressions using MathJax
• Synchronization your markdown documents in the cloud
• Offline editing
• Real-time HTML preview with Scroll Link feature to bind editor and preview scrollbars
• Export your documents in Markdown, HTML or PDF

[btbonval]

Need to determine if StackEdit has a history or revision control.

If not, we'd want to pair this with something like Mercurial, Google's Diff-Match-Patch, or some other document-level change revision system.

[AndrewMagliozzi]

Let's also check on google drive diffs in that API. I know there is something about drive sync in the StackEdit docs.

I actually think that may suffice for doc, docx, et al. We probably shouldn't edit PDF HTML anyway as it's intended to be static.

On Jan 20, 2014, at 4:20 PM, Bryan Bonvallet notifications@github.com wrote:

Need to determine if StackEdit has a history or revision control.

If not, we'd want to pair this with something like Mercurial, Google's Diff-Match-Patch, or some other document-level change revision system.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[btbonval]

Public Lab recently had a discussion about Markdown being unfriendly to new users, so there's a discussion of alternative software which is inherently markdown but has nice editors. https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/151

[btbonval]

From that thread, I found VueJS which looked like a good FOSS solution. http://vuejs.org/examples/

[btbonval]

Not that typing markdown in a browser would ever be easy on a phone, but I just looked at the VueJS example site on my mobile phone. Looks alright.

[AndrewMagliozzi]

If we go with Etherpad (as I think I'm inclined), here is a repo that adds Markdown support:

https://github.com/JohnMcLear/ep_markdown

[btbonval]

That looks handy. I'll cross post to other list as Public Lab already uses etherpad.

The only problem I see with that is we'd have to run etherpad on a node.js stack with access to the same database as the python stack.

That shouldn't be a huge issue. I think we can run a node Heroku app which points at the same internet-accessible database with no additional cost.

[btbonval]

Oh, that project is basically dead and there is no clear licensing :(

[AndrewMagliozzi]

Which project is dead?

[AndrewMagliozzi]

here's a list of all existing etherpad plugins:

https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite/wiki/Plugin,-a-list

[btbonval]

ep_markdown specifically hasn't been touched in over a year and has no license in the source code or the package.json file. It is not MIT license, GPL, or anything. We'd need to contact the author and request a license be included or special permission to use.

If there are other, better maintained, more clearly licensed markdown plugins for etherpad, that would be handy.

[btbonval]

I can't find source code or licensing for the only other markdown plugin, which is called ep_markdownify.

From the package description, it disables the GUI buttons in favor of supporting markdown formatting. If we could get license information and it allows us to fork development of ep_markdown, I suspect that would be the better choice to ep_markdownify.

[btbonval]

Posted an issue to ep_markdown requesting license information be included.

[btbonval]

Author asked me to add Apache 2 license, I'm guessing as a pull request. ep_markdown looks much better with an Apache 2 license.

[btbonval]

PR created and accepted. ep_markdown is now forkable with an Apache 2 license. Sweet. We can go this route now if desired.

[btbonval]

@yourcelf suggests we move to HTML as our primary storage format instead of markdown.

We could add a markdown-HTML conversion step to sanitize/cleanup the HTML with a markdown engine, but store that HTML output as the primary note content for editing.

The suggestion is because there are more rich text editors that operate on HTML.

[btbonval]

@yourcelf made a good argument against Etherpad because

1. its storage system is separate and would not integrate into our existing database, so we'd either have to import/export or store all notes directly in Etherpad
2. there's a strong latency and Etherpad does not scale well to large numbers

[btbonval]

Possible workflow for migration to HTML:

1. add a field to store HTML
2. migrate existing markdown into the HTML field
3. update rendering to drop notes into the HTML field and not markdown
4. add a step to the note import process which converts the markdown to HTML before saving it to the database (near https://github.com/FinalsClub/karmaworld/blob/master/karmaworld/apps/notes/management/commands/convert_notes_to_markdown.py#L34)
5. remove markdown field
6. rename all markdown references in the code (e.g. NoteMarkdown class) to be more generalized concepts of Note editing.

[btbonval]

@AndrewMagliozzi I think we have successfully implemented this ticket for Edit Notes, as we can edit certain notes in production. Good to close?

[AndrewMagliozzi]

yes, good to close. It may need some tweaking for the permissions on who gets to edit, but it's definitely good for now.

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 11:50 AM, Bryan Bonvallet notifications@github.com wrote:

@AndrewMagliozzi https://github.com/AndrewMagliozzi I think we have successfully implemented this ticket for Edit Notes, as we can edit certain notes in production. Good to close?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/FinalsClub/karmaworld/issues/272#issuecomment-94849732 .