Import and manipulate bibtex entries

[scoskey]

This is a large feature request.

It would be nice to have an administrative panel for importing, creating, editing, and exporting bibtex entries. This is done for instance by the plugin teachpress. Unfortunately, teachpress tries to accomplish too much, with the end result being unsatisfactory. Here are some things that teachpress does right:

• import just by pasting bib entries into a textbox
• export by displaying bib entries in a textbox

Here are some things that teachpress does wrong, but which could be easily remedied by making the plugin simpler:

• It has a fixed list of allowed fields. This makes their code look ridiculous. It also makes their entry editor look silly: it is a huge array of textboxes (usually mostly empty). It would be better to allow arbitrary fields, and to edit a whole entry all with a single textbox.
• It only allows you to cite an entry by "number" (whatever that is), not by key
• It tries to sanitize the entries too much. This kills your metadata and causes a poor export. I think this should be left until the moment that the entries will be displayed.
• It tries to keep track of which entries are "yours" (whatever this means). The feature is broken and irrelevant.

[i2000s]

To me, for the minimum work, we may only need an interface to allow users to input a bibtex code, then a button to append the bibtex code (after automatic checking, permission verification and so on) to the centralized .bib file on the server, and a button to show the .bib file on a webpage and allow users to make changes online. Certainly, users can select a different .bib file to manipulate if available. I think this feature is very useful!