Wysiwyg Editing of Play! Framework Templates with the Aloha Editor

Posted by Brian Porter on May 03, 2013

aloha-savesOk, so it is only partial editing, but still this is an interesting step in the “no CMS” direction. What I have done is modified the example code which I posted on github last week for inline editing of HTML5 elements with the Aloha WYSIWYG Editor to actually save the new content back in to the Scala Template.

I find this useful for allowing non-techie colleagues to edit and optimize text and wordings in more content oriented templates. Of course it does directly modify the source, so in the case of a live website you would want to do this in the development environment and then commit, push, deploy the new version – hence “no CMS“.

In my example I have limited the frontend code to a block in the footer template. It is only rendered into the page if the following value is set to true in the application.conf:

play-aloha.admin=true

One of the non-elegant parts of the code is deciding which template file to look for the HTML to replace. Right now it is hard coded. I supposed the most pragmatic way would be to create a hashtable mapping URL’s to filenames.

Here you can see the changed HTML in the scala template:

git-diff

 

The code is in github here: https://github.com/poornerd/play-aloha

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