Multi-user simultaneous editing support

[asheking]

add online editing, allowing multiple users to redline and display all edits to the ower

[Alfonso Martínez de Lizarrondo]

This is a job that it's better done by the CMS like it happens in every wiki.

FCKeditor doesn't know anything about users or owners.

[Martin Kou]

Perhaps he meant real time cooperative editing like Google Docs?

[Alfonso Martínez de Lizarrondo]

I don't know what's that feature of Google Docs, but if several users are editing at the same time, then it means that all the changes in one client goes back to the server and then it's spread to the rest of the clients. It doesn't seems easy to deal with it, even from a users point of view.

I saw it as the revision control features of Word, where the changes made to a document by each user (one does a change and later other user cames and changes other thing) are marked so they can be reviewed, but in the web that's a wiki.

[Martin Kou]

Replying to alfonsoml:

I don't know what's that feature of Google Docs, but if several users are editing at the same time, then it means that all the changes in one client goes back to the server and then it's spread to the rest of the clients. It doesn't seems easy to deal with it, even from a users point of view.

I saw it as the revision control features of Word, where the changes made to a document by each user (one does a change and later other user cames and changes other thing) are marked so they can be reviewed, but in the web that's a wiki.

Yes, "serveral users editing at the same time" is what is happening in Google Docs. If you have two computers (or one computer with VMWare) you can try this: open the same document with two accounts, makes changes to the document in one computer, and the changes would appear highlighted in yellow on the other. I used it when I was writing my final year project report with my partner. :)

Some of my friends have done something similar, but with spreadsheets. And, they've added a little twist to the cooperative editing idea. Since cooperative editing would usually involve the server "pushing" data to the browser, (by the ​comet technique, for example), you could use that to push other stuff to the clients as well. Stock quotes for example. Their spreadsheet software can be found ​here. Unfortunately they are not open source.

While FCKeditor isn't the "same thing" as Google Docs or EditGrid, it might be useful if we make an interface to let the server "push" changes to the client.

[Alfonso Martínez de Lizarrondo]

I keep on thinking that those features are outside (at least for the moment) the scope of FCKeditor.

We could care about providing an API so it's possible to log all the changes, and then send them to the other side, where they are applied or highlighted or whatever, but there are so many different ways of using AJAX and JS libraries that no matter which one is used, there will be someone that ask why isn't his preferred one supported. And in the future, according to the WHATWG there will be Server Events ​http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-server-sent-events.html#server-sent-events on top of that.

[Frederico Caldeira Knabben]

Yes, we can't handle it for now, but let's leave this discussion open.

[Piotrek Koszuliński]

We tried to build such an editor on top of CKEditor on last year's Node.JS Knockout 48h marathon - ​https://github.com/nko3/epic-fail

We were able to created PoC which worked, but was very buggy. Making it usable would take a lot of time.

[Mike Slinn]

An API would be really helpful.