Hi Raed

I think you must have been pondering a similar problem: (a) the
difficulty of drafting up an article using the online editing tools, (b)
the problems that this would cause when working with limitied
connectivity (rare these days in most places, but perhaps not in places
which MDLF serves?) and (c) the ability to give journos with limited
tech skills the ability to upload something with minimal knowledge.

I think that an email interface has a greater chance of being developed
though, versus a standalone interface. Using a mail-to-server thing
gives you all the power of your email program (if you need more power,
choose a better email program) and requires only server-side
programming. I have written a helpticket system that parses and saves
MIME messages to a database; I don't think it would be tremendously
difficult.

Your downloadable program has the clear advantage of being able to offer
previews of published articles. But I don't think that this is an issue
that greatly concerns people worried about the above cases (a)-(c). I am
sure there must be CMSes with offline editors already in place. There
are certainly offline blogging tools.

Cheers

JP

raed@tamamtech.com wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have an offline interface idea that I discussed with Mugur, Paul and
> Sava in the summercamp. The offline interface consists of a Windows
> application that allows that user to input his/her articles and
> multimedia files and then with on single click, upload everything to
> the campsite server. The application will work like this:
>
> 1- Installation and setup procedures:
> When the application is installed and run for the first time, it will
> ask the user to input the campsite server ip and the setup username
> and password. The setup username and password will be a campsite
> account that is allowed to download publication details. After the
> user input the data, the application will connect to the campsite
> server (through a server-side php script) and download the publication
> structure and sections/articles templates to the user local computer.
>
> 2- Offline usage:
> The user can create articles inside whatever sections and
> publication(s) using the application that will contain a powerful
> editor. The user can attach photos, audio, video to the article and
> s/he can even preview it using the downloaded templates. When the user
> is ready to transfer the articles to the server, s/he connects to the
> internet, selects the articles to transfer, and then inputs his/her
> username and password. The application will then connect to the
> campsite server, supply the username and password and then transfer
> all the articles and multimedia files to the server through a backend
> php script. If there is any errors with the transfer, the server will
> return error codes to the application where they will be presented to
> the user.
>
> This kind of application has many benefit:
> 1- You don't need an internet connection to create and input your
> articles. You only connect to the internet when you want to transfer
> the final article to the server. The issue of internet usage is
> important when we are talking about dialup access (very common in
> third world countries).
> 2- Journalists can create their articles and reports on their laptops
> on the road, the don't need to use Word or Notepad to write down the
> text, and then copy and paste it into the online editor. This
> application gives them the freedom of creating articles on any
> computer (either connected on not to the internet).
> 3- It's much much faster to create and publish articles and report
> with this system. The speed of a desktop application is much far
> faster than online application. creating and editing application is
> much faster and time saver.
> 4- To my knowledge, Campsite will the be the first content management
> system that has 2 interfaces, offline and online!
>
> This is one feature of such an offline interface. In the future we can
> add more user rights (granting specific users the ability to transfer
> articles from offline editors), give the offline editor the ability to
> "checkout" articles from the server for editing,..etc
>
> So what do you think of such a system?
>
> _______________________________
> Raed Neshiewat
> Director
>
> TamamTech Inc.
> PO Box: 20513
> Amman, Jordan 11118
> Tel: +962 6 461 7474
> Fax: +962 6 463 0238
> Email: raed@tamamtech.com
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Pye"
> To:
> Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 6:25 PM
> Subject: [campsite-dev] Feature idea: Article mail-in?
>
>
>> Hi all
>>
>> I was just wondering if anyone had thought if this as an idea for an
>> alternative way for new (not-yet-published) articles to be submitted to
>> Campsite: send 'em in to the server by email.
>>
>> Allowing someone to use email would mean that all of the high-powered
>> tools for working on stuff offline would be available: you could use a
>> word processor or mozilla composer etc and then paste the text from Word
>> into your email window, then just send the document. It would make it
>> easier in many cases to insert images and get the HTML just right for
>> the raw document. This would leave the WYSIWYG editor to be used by
>> people who didn't want to use email, but of course also for all
>> corrections and updates, and entering the article 'intro' etc.
>>
>> What would be involved in getting this to work?
>>
>> 1. Firstly, the campsite machine would have to be running an SMTP
>> server and would have to have mime-decoding libaries installed, so
>> that it could catch and 'read' incoming emails. You would discard
>> (or forward to somebody else) emails that weren't from registered
>> email addresses.
>> 2. You would need to have a way to specify the document type (eg
>> fastnews vs extended, or whatever), unless it were possible to
>> change that later. That could be done with a default document
>> type, and then perhaps a tag like [extended] in the email subject.
>> 3. Embedded images would need to be added to the image library.
>> 4. Any disallowed content or tags etc would need to be mentioned,
>> perhaps in added error message text at the top of the imported
>> article.
>> 5. You might want to allow raw word documents to be sent in. There is
>> an open source word-to-text and word-to-HTML project that could be
>> used to fish out the content in that case.
>> 6. You might want to run word-tag-cleaning on the imported HTML.
>> 7. You might want to allow incoming mails to be GPG-signed/encypted
>> by the sender in order to reduce the risk of bogus articles.
>> 8. Campsite users wanting to be able to use this feature would have
>> to record their email address (and perhaps their public key) in
>> the campsite admin pages.
>>
>> Does anyone think this would be useful in practise? Even if it were only
>> to work with plain text emails, I reckon it could be a good way for
>> authors to get their rough draft text into the system.
>>
>> Cheers
>> JP
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>

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