Hi devs,
I was intrigued by the concept of [Quick Parts in MS](Use Quick Parts and AutoText in Word and Outlook - Microsoft Support I) that was mentioned in Something like "quick parts" or "mini templates" in the WYSIWYG Editor? and I thought it could be interesting to brainstorm about it a bit to see if we could come up with a position on that topic.
So, for me the idea of Quick Parts is to have some reusable content that you can paste wherever you want (in the wiki editor or WYSIWYG editor). I see it as some content written in a given syntax and that when pasted is converted to the target syntax of where it’s pasted.
Let’s see what we have already that is the closest to this:
- Wiki macros
- Difference: harder to create and generic. They’re not instantiated with parameter values and content value.
- Document Template
- Difference: The scope is not the same, document templates are full-fledged documents and not document parts
- Code snippets (from snippets.xwiki.org)
- Difference: currently not usable from within an XWiki instance.
- Note: I’ve always wanted to create a snippets app that would connect to snippets.xwiki.org and list snippets inside of XWiki so that you could insert them + other features (ability to save/upload new snippets). We could imagine the ability to create new snippets locally without uploading them and thus acting as personal snippets or even shared between groups/users. If this extension was adding some editor buttons to insert a snippet + the ability to select some content when viewing or editing a page to save it as a snippet (I guess this is the hardest part), then it could fit the bill. Especially if the extension was configurable so that it wouldn’t check snippets.xwiki.org (for the cases where you don’t want to allow your XWiki instance to connect to some external site).
- I don’t remember the name but we used to have an extension to copy web content and paste it inside of XWiki at some point (nothing official and it could just have been a POC developed by XWiki SAS for some client).
Others:
- I guess there are also existing Browser extensions to implement this.
- Difference: probably personal only and no ability to share between users/groups of a XWiki instance + no tight integration in XWiki (with a toolbar entry in the WYSIWYG editor for example)
So 2 questions:
- Do you think this would be a useful feature?
- WDYT of the analysis above?
Thanks
PS: I have no plan to implement anything, this is just so that we discuss it to know more about our interest (or non-interest) for the feature, and have a place to come back too in the future if the need surfaces.