Simple and Powerful Text Formatting

Web-based content management systems have always had trouble allowing non-technical people to author content intended for the web. One method systems have used to simplify formatting is to replicate common authoring controls using Javascript. For example, Movable Type has buttons for bold, underlined, and italicized text, and a button to create links. In Movable Type, plugins can also add global text filtering capabilities, by adding filters to common template tags. And there are many plugins that do this, providing everything from quote education to Wiki formatting.

But there are problems with the global filtering approach that we hope to solve in the next version of Movable Type.

• Authors have to edit their templates in order to add these filtering options. Not only is this beyond the scope of understanding for some users, but it can be incredibly tedious to edit every template.
• Since filters are set on a template level (in the tags), they are not applied when previewing an entry. This makes preview fairly useless for specially-formatted entries.
• Because templates are shared on a per-blog basis and are not specific to authors, all authors must use the same formatting style.

To allow both more control and easier formatting, we're adding a new feature in the next version of Movable Type: Text Formatting. This will replace the current "Convert Line Breaks" option. Or, rather, the current "Convert Line Breaks" will simply be one of the available text formatting options, along with (hopefully) many other options, from POD to XML to Wiki. (Screenshot of Text Formatting menu)

We envision Text Formatting options as complete, encapsulated formatters, handling both the formatting of structured text and any desired typographical details (smart quotes, etc), analogous to the way in which Textile handles quote education and its own miniature formatting language.

Plugins will be able to easily add new Text Formatting options to the menu on the New/Edit Entry screen. For example, this code will add a new option called "Wiki", which passes entry text through the Text::WikiFormat Perl module, allowing simple Wiki formatting:

MT->add_text_filter(wiki => {
    label => 'Wiki',
    on_format => sub {
        require Text::WikiFormat;
        Text::WikiFormat::format($_[0]);
    },
});

This approach solves all of the problems noted above: templates do not have to be edited, because the formatting is selected via the MT interface; formatting choices will influence the preview screen; authors can use different formatting options for their own entries, because the option is set on a per-entry basis. So, for example, if I want to write my entries in POD format, and Mena wants to write hers in Wiki format, we can do that.