Buckets and shelves concept in Comatose

[Roman]

Hey guys,

We using comatose in our site. Very good CMS actually, thank you for
that.

But now we have idea to use buckets and shelves concept in comatose
somehow. Something similar as we can see on wordpress for example. The
reason for that is make creating page more simple for business people,
which can even don't know what html is :)

Under buckets and shelves concept I mean, when we can drag-and-drop
interface for assigning a block to a region, and for controlling the
order of blocks within regions. When you can create page by just drag
elements (text blocks, headers, pictures etc.) on page, and don't
touch html code.

Please help me to understand how is can be done in comatose, if it
possible at all.

[Roman]

Guys,

Say something please. I need your help.
Let me know if I am not clear with this question.

Thank you

[Josh Schairbaum]

Roman,

Are you referring to something like a TinyMCE editor or something so
it seems more like a word processor? If so I would it's possible,
there's even some Rails plugins. If not, I'm afraid I don't follow. :)

Regards,
Josh

[Andrew Kuklewicz]

Hi Roman -

Comatose provides a data structure for content and logic for rendering, it has no logic that has anything to do with layout, so everything you are talking about with books and shelves (for which one might also use the more standard term of widgets) would have to be implemented on top of that.  So I don't know what comatose is giving you for the scenario you are considering.

You could perhaps use the hierarchical structure of comatose as way to layout the pages.

For example, each page a person is creating could start as a page in comatose.

Then each content area/shelf that would contain some ordered set of widgets/books would be a subpage of the main page.
Finally, each widget/book would be a 'leaf' in the hierarchy, and would be ordered as a child subpage of the containing shelf.

so in comatose, the hierarchy might be structured like this:

root
|
+--> page
    |
    +--> shelf 1
    |    |
    |    +--> book 1
    |    |
    |    +--> book 2
    |
    |
    +--> shelf 2
         |
         +--> book 1
         |
         +--> book 2

You would then need to create a page to render each comatose page that assumed the above structure, and used it to render the sections of the page.  I am undecided how best to create that layout - either in the comatose page text itself, or as the layout for the comatose pages, but something like that.  Just thinking about an approach here, not at all sure of the details.

That's my $.02, not sure it' a great idea, but that's one way to approach it.

-Andrew