Questions regarding functionality of BEdita:

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Scott

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Apr 27, 2012, 1:43:39 PM4/27/12
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Greetings - your app looks amazing!

I was looking for a simple and personal CMS and came across this and saw it's potential for another project I had in mind.

I have a couple questions if you don’t mind:

I assume when you refer to "frontend" you are talking about any type of frontend - regardless of type and location:

- iPhone, iPad, Android, RSS Reader, Some remote web publishing suite, etc...

My main question:

Does BEdita provide a WEB Services API out of the box? Or do I have still have to write that?

I was thinking about making a to-do style list that can be viewed/updated/deleted from an iPhone (from multiple users)?

so... In BEdita, Can I:

- Create the users (with passwords)
- Create the to-do list object/document
- Link the users to the document (with what permissions I want them to have)

Then get an iPhone developer to write a simple app that can:

- Connect to the web service
- Read, Update, Add, Delete - based on their perms?

Or:

Must I still write that particular WebService API?

Once again - great app, and thanks for reading my questions! :-)

Stefano Rosanelli

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Apr 28, 2012, 6:36:08 AM4/28/12
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Hi Scott,

thanks for your compliments and your interest in BEdita.
I will try to answer to all your questions.

On 04/27/2012 07:43 PM, Scott wrote:
> I assume when you refer to "frontend" you are talking about any type of frontend - regardless of type and location:
>
> - iPhone, iPad, Android, RSS Reader, Some remote web publishing suite, etc...

Yes, precisely.
Frontends can be all kind of applications that "use" data or services of
a BEdita instance. So your examples are correct.
Other "actual" examples (that we are working on) are ebooks, but also
printed books (through integration with some desktop publishing solutions).

> Does BEdita provide a WEB Services API out of the box? Or do I have still have to write that?

BEdita has a "partial" web service like API. It's a REST service
actually, that you can use to read all of your publications data. Take a
look at a our demo, the 'first-section' may be viewed like:
http://site.demo.bedita.com/first-section -- normal view
http://site.demo.bedita.com/xml/first-section -- xml view
http://site.demo.bedita.com/json/first-section -- json view

So, just using /xml or /json lets you navigate your publications in
those formats.
> I was thinking about making a to-do style list that can be viewed/updated/deleted from an iPhone (from multiple users)?

BEdita lacks at the moment a service to "write" data to your instance
(update/delete...).
I would suggest you to write a minimal frontend application for that
that you may use as service provider for your iPhone app. Using simple
REST calls you will be able to do what you want.
It should be "really" easy - we will be glad give you some help/tips -
it's an interesting application/extension for us too.

ciao
Stefano

Scott

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Apr 30, 2012, 1:26:23 PM4/30/12
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Thanks Stefano!

I appreciate the response. It does answer my question. I did see at the end of "http://www.bedita.com/frontend/my-first-frontend" the JSON/XML examples, but did not know if those were the only ones - so thanks for clearing that up.

After posting, I kind of thought about needing to eventually write my own functionality due to the limitless possibilities that an out-of-the box system wouldn't be able to do.

Since I am just starting to learn OO, MVC frameworks, and WebServices - I am not there yet... But when I am I will def be taking a deeper look into the app.

Does BEdita offer better tools to help with the building of those web services - more than offered directly by Cake?

And is Cake/BEdita tightly coupled that if a security issue came about and needed to be updated, does the one install take care of either/both - or will I be responsible to upgrade/patch cake separately?

Lastly - what "object" in BEdita would best represent a "list"? Or would I just create that? I was thinking it would have numbered items, that could also contain sub-lists...

Thanks again!

Stefano Rosanelli

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May 2, 2012, 3:50:56 AM5/2/12
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Hi Scott,

On 04/30/2012 07:26 PM, Scott wrote:
> Does BEdita offer better tools to help with the building of those web services - more than offered directly by Cake?

BEdita does note have other or different tools to build services than
those offered by Cake.

> And is Cake/BEdita tightly coupled that if a security issue came about and needed to be updated, does the one install take care of either/both - or will I be responsible to upgrade/patch cake separately?

Cake is bundled inside BEdita, important security issues updates of
third party components are done in BEdita directly - in other words: you
may only update BEdita, the dev team will take care of internal
component updates that have impacts on BEdita itself (same applies to
other components like Smarty or TinyMCE for example).

> Lastly - what "object" in BEdita would best represent a "list"? Or would I just create that? I was thinking it would have numbered items, that could also contain sub-lists...

I would first define the "list item" (document, short news or custom
object), than I would use a "document" for your list and define a free
relation called "list" (for example), containing actual "list items".
But you could achieve same results in many different ways in BEdita...
for example: sections for "lists", contained objects for "items"...

ciao
Stefano
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