Integrating Features of Draft into Habari

[Les Henderson]

Since Mark M. pointed out Draft https://draftin.com , I thought I'd pass on the info sent from the developer.

"I would love to see Draft integrated into more things. There are 2 ways people have been incorporating Draft into their platforms. The Draft API http://docs.withdraft.com/#rest-api or Webhooks: http://docs.withdraft.com/#webhooks "

Nathan Kontny

[Chris J. Davis]

Hmm, not sure how we would leverage this well. Something to think about though. Thanks for bringing it to our attention Les.

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[Chris Meller]

They don’t have an API, so it’s not directly relevant to this discussion, but I thought I’d point out Penflip (penflip.com). It’s more focused around a workflow similar to Git (version control among a team) than Draft’s write-and-have-someone-review method, but I find the interface more appealing. Just thought I’d give it a shoutout in case anyone hadn’t seen it.

[TexasMynsted]

Penflip looks interesting.  Because it is built on git, it can be treated like a normal git repository.  Integration would seem to be along the lines of git integration.  The problem I see with penflip is that I see no way to keep penflip projects private.  I would not want to have writing public while it is still unreleased and or being worked on by an editor.

The killer features of collaborative writing tools are:

- Markdown for simple presentation (Markdown is the Future. There are habari plugins supporting Markdown)

- Revisions (Habari already supports revisions of posts, or at least it is possible to keep editing a post before publishing it.)

- Diff (This is vital for editing.  I do not know of anything in Habari to do this.  There is this --> diff-implementation but it is targeted to code which is not a perfect fit for writing.  Creating a php diff tool for writing would likely be an outstanding and popular project.)

A comparison of collaborative writing tools can be found here --> Collaborative Writing Tools in the Lab

I am not sure if integrating any existing solution is right for Habari, perhaps implementing something like this, in Habari is the better solution.

[Chris Meller]

When you create a project it asks whether it should be public or private along with the name.

Markdown sucks. It’s not the future, it needs to die.

Revisions are saved, we simply have no UI to expose it or provide diffs at present. That’s something we’ve talked about recently (specifically related to wiki functionality).

It should be noted there is a plugin that integrates with Simple Note that exposes your notes as a silo. That’s a pretty easy way to integrate something like this into Habari.

[TexasMynsted]

I still prefer having the features built-in to habari over integrating something.  If built-in, there would be no reason to force somebody to use Markdown.
The diff piece still seems like the most challenging part.  (A nice writer/editor targeted diff.)

[Chris Meller]

I agree. I think it was always expected they would eventually make themselves into plugins so Habari could handle it directly.

Diffs aren’t that hard. There are libraries (like SimpleDiff: https://github.com/paulgb/simplediff/blob/master/php/simplediff.php) that cover the basics and are only a few lines long. They obviously wouldn’t be nearly as good as Git’s diffs or the ones produced by the actual diff command line tool, but we could get it done relatively painlessly.

I wouldn’t say the two methods are mutually exclusive, though. Saving revisions in Habari is a great feature, but I write other things in Penflip as well… Just because I plan for it to be a blog post doesn’t mean I should have to dump the tool I use. I think there’s plenty of room for both.