(See also the 50€ Bounty for this feature)
Short description
It would be nice to be able to edit individual sections of a page (separated by headlines) instead of the whole page. Two or more users should be able to edit different sections of a page without an edit conflict. A link to edit a section should only be displayed if a user has edit rights for the corresponding page.
This should be a huge usability improvement. Currently its pain to edit large pages, for example, MoinMoinQuestions before it was refactored into separate pages by Alex. Also, avoiding edit conflicts is very important, as they really suck when you get them. -- NirSoffer 2005-06-03 23:21:44
I already wrote a kind of section editor for my SGML Docbook parser. See http://reinsburgstrasse.dyndns.org/test (is no longer active within this wiki). May be someone want to port it to the 1.3 branch and do the needed integaration work -- FlorianFesti 2005-06-04 11:51:21
The way we do this is to write small pages and then use the Include macro to pull them together like so:
[[TableOfContents()]] [[Include(/OverallSolution,"Overall Solution",1)]] [[Include(/Concepts,"Concepts",1)]] [[Include(/Strategy,"Strategy",1)]] [[Include(/Components,"Components",1)]] [[Include(/Products,"Products",1)]]
That works pretty well, but some enhancements could make it better:
When you subscribe to/watch the parent page, you haven't also subscribed to the included pages. You can add a regex to your UserPreferences, but new users don't know how to do that and may not realize they've only requested email notification for changes to the wrapper page.
Sometimes you don't anticipate at what level you will include a section. If the headings in a page start with, h1 (e.g. = A Title =), but you want to include in another page at a deeper level, then you have a problem. There should be a way to have the wiki adjust the headings depending on where in the page it was included.
- Also, it would be nice to automate the chunking of a section in some way. I find that it is only after I've written some that I determine a page needs to be broken up. Then it take some work to cut the section, add the macro, save that page, create the new page, paste the content.
-- DavidCramer 2005-06-21
One other FeatureRequest related to this technique of creating editable sections via included pages: in 1.2 in the classic theme there were little balloon icons by the included pages' headings so you could click once and edit that section. IIRC, when you saved the edit, you returned to the main page (at that section). That was very nice. In 1.3.4 that feature no longer exists in any of the themes--I think it should be added to all themes. -- DavidCramer 2005-06-21
One drawback I can think of to this approach is that as the including pages get very large, they take a long time to load. So, on the one hand, this would be a good way to write a book and then use the print css (or perhaps an xslt transform to go to fo then to pdf), but as the books become long, the main pages gets cumbersome. I can imagine some solutions (e.g. having a feature that loads just the toc of a page-of-pages into a firefox/mozilla sidebar or just makes a separate toc page for IE users), but I'm not sure what the perfect solution is. --DavidCramer 2005-06-22
MediaWiki and DokuWiki have this feature, It's very useful when editing large pages. it's also announced as their advantages. Besides loading speeds, it's awful to find a proper insert point in large number of words.
I'm trying to contribute section editing functionality to MoinMoin and patched some source codes (text_html.py, PageEditor.py, wikiaction.py, multiconfig.py) on MoinMoin 1.5b2. You can try it on http://angel.icu.ac.kr/~test/HelpMiscellaneous/FrequentlyAskedQuestions. Press the edit icon on the right of the heading to edit the section. It's experimental demo site and it may raise critical problems in moin (in fact, it does with Include macro, and so on). I'm still looking on it and going to open the patches soon. -- SeungikLee 2005-11-21 12:01:30
See ExtensionProposals/SectionEditing -- SeungikLee 2005-11-22 07:20:13
I would definitely agree that section editing is an important feature. When I was looking for a wiki, I narrowed it down to MoinMoin and DokuWiki. MoinMoin won with the 1.5 release because of the WYSIWYG editor. Still pining away at the section editing of DokuWiki. Now, DokuWiki developers are working on implementing wikiwyg and with that the scale will tilt back in favour of Dokuwiki... The endless pondering continues... Ivaylo, 2006-01-12
Yet another approach: (-- JulianRomero 2006-05-12 12:10:05)
- Pre-requisites:
- accurate HTML to wiki conversor available
- AJAX library
- storage API revamped
- wysiwyg editor
Pages with editable sections can be a bunch of Include macro calls or just a page with header (being level 2 headers the sections)
The editing should be allowed directly in the HTML. Double click in the section body and a micro version of the wysiwyg editor appears just in place. For users with text as favorite editor a simple textarea will be used (wiki code will be requested to server using AJAX) also in place
- After loosing the focus the modified HTML section content (or wiki text) is sent to the server using AJAX
- The new storage layer should be able to apply the change using the page, section header or section id and new content as input
- A handy "add" and "delete" icons may exist to manipulate section (somewhere near the section header)
- Edition of non-wiki sections will be handled by the HTML editor (in the textarea is easy)
Hi, What about this feature. Is there ''Work In Progress'' ? Thanks.
The editor code first needs some cleanup (I guess we will do that AFTER merging the 1.7 storage branch, to avoid more work being caused by conflicts). -- ThomasWaldmann 2007-11-29 09:05:41
Quote from ExtensionProposals/SectionEditing:
These patches are NOT confirmed by moin developers. Use them at your own risk.
So are developers going to consider these patches and add this feature in the box (for ex., to 1.9 in 2009)? -- DmitryKurilov 2008-10-13 06:53:09
Sadly, this is still not a feature of MoinMoin - since over 5 years 
I still think, it would be a ***big*** advancement for MoinMoin! Please do not forget this 