World of Codecraft

would like to add a button to the toolbar. If you click on it I need a
dialog box with the list of phonetics symbols. The user click on every
symbol he/she needs and they appear in a text box he/she could edit

When finish to add symbols click on the ok button and the text in the
text box is inserted in the document

Similar how windows charmap works but only for phonetics symbols

Cheers!

I forget to mention it will be useful to have a clear step-by-step tutorial

Thanks!

Yes, I understood that, see my previous mail…

Longer answer:

The first step is to create a layer (called ‘Implementation’ in Kupu)
that glues HTML snippets into the toolbar and body of the Kupu HTML
file. To do this, you create a directory with .kupu (XSLT) files, which
contain information about what XSL files to include (include.kupu), what
parts to include (wire.kupu) and snippets of HTML (other .kupu files). I
guess in your case you will want to copy and adjust include.kupu,
wire.kupu, head.kupu and toolbar.kupu from the plone layer to make them
include your custom .js files and the button, and create a file called
something like ‘charmap.kupu’ for the dialog box, which you add to
include.kupu and wire.kupu. For more information about the .kupu files,
see doc/TEMPLATE-SYSTEM.txt and check out a simple layer such as
‘widgeteer’ to see how it’s built up.

Then you write JS code that gets triggered by the user selecting, or
clicking or whatnot, a character in your charmap. This could be written
as a Kupu plugin (known as ‘Tools’ in Kupu), but I guess you could just
add a function to your dialog box too, since you won’t really use the
plugin framework. This should contain the code I wrote in my previous
script, and some more code to close the dialog, etc.

Then you copy the Kupu init file, in Plone’s case
plone/kupu_plone_layer/kupuinit.js, to your layer directory and adjust
it so that your dialog pops up if the button gets clicked. There’s
plenty of examples of how to write a simple button in the init file
already, it’s a two liner that says ‘create a button, register to Kupu’,
basically. Make sure to copy the plone layer’s head.kupu file to your
layer, and adjust it so it uses your init code instead of Plone’s.

When those steps are taken, you can add your layer to the root make file
, or create a local make file, and run it so it builds the template (see
info in the docs). This should overwrite (if done well) the default
Plone HTML with your customized version.

I understand the current make situation isn’t very easy to work with,
though it’s rather flexible it’s relatively cumbersome to create a new
layer. Hopefully, though, this information, along with the docs, is
enough to get you started…

Wow! I only could understand the words but not the concept
If you try to put in the place of someone who never try to do what I
need to do you could understand that this sounds chinese

I know that to do good documentation it’s the hardest part of our job
but when a process is so difficult like this if you don’t have a
reasonable help you are lost

Thanks for the help but to solve my problem first I need to translate
your words to something understandable to a newbie
I don’t want to seem ungrateful I only want to help kupu developers to
improve the support and step-by-step helps more than 3 documents with a
lot of words and deep discussion of concepts (like kupu documentation)

If we think in child to write the help we write better documentation. A
newbie is like a child and if you use steps (ol or ul), graphics, etc
then the newbie could do the job. Deep discussions are useful when you
are experienced and want to make things better

Thanks a lot!

Did you understand the Guido’s instructions? I’m short?
I’m very frustrated because I can’t lose all the day with this task

Can you understand me or I’m crazy?

I understand that fully, but unfortunately writing such documentation
takes _huge_ amounts of time, and I barely have time to work on Kupu
itself (and I guess that’s the same with the other developers). It’s a
common scenario in open-source: stuff gets developed/written when it’s
needed, by the people who need it… Of course, that does mean that it
would be _highly_ appreciated by others like you if you’d take the step
of trying to bring it to a good end, documenting each step in the way,
yourself… Of course you can ask if you get stuck, I’d be happy to help
you out answering (shorter questions here.

If your understanding of the techniques used in Kupu is very limited,
however, I can imagine you don’t want to go through all the trouble…
There’s a lot of things involved here. I guess this is a general problem
with programming: complex systems are hard to understand and develop
for. Having said that, I do think Kupu can be improved here and there,
hopefully we can think of easier ways to extend it and such at some point.

Sorry for not being able to help you out all the way, I hope you do
understand my situation though…

No problem, Guido!
I write code like you and I understand perfectly the situation
But if you try to understand my situation you could understand that I
can’t say we can’t implement the feature
If I can’t do it with kupu I need to change the editor and do the job
even if it take longer

If you make a first step-by-step description perhaps I could complete
the help recipe with the next iterations

But I need an initial draft that could follow, something I could follow