OpenWetWare:Feature list/Lab notebook/2007 Oct Brainstorming/Julius

The lab notebook model I have in mind centers around an offline editor that can interact with the wiki. In the lab, I would rather use all my offline tools to create lab notebook entries, and then post them to the wiki after I have had a chance to review them at the end of the day. The basic idea would be to use a text editor pluggin to:

• Create Entries:
  1. Edit an entry from a template offline
  2. Using the page title and date, post the entry to a new page
• Edit existing entries:
  1. grab a list of all pages under a certain root path (I imagine all my lab notebook entries to be under Julius_B._Lucks/lab_notebook/ for example)
  2. Selet a page and retrieve the content
  3. Post the content with a comment on what changes were made

The best way to describe what I mean is by viewing the screencast on blogging with textmate, where the TextMate developer interacts with his WordPress blog by writing posts offline, then using a TextMate pluggin to fetch and post the posts. The pluggin uses the xmlrpc api's work with common blogging platforms (Wordpress,Blogger,etc.), which are not limited to TextMate.

A similar system can be achieved with an api to access the wiki in very much the same way. I am more than happy to develop a TextMate pluggin to do this, and I am sure others would do so with other editors on other platforms if such an api was available.