Document-Centric Editing

There are two approaches to editing content in Zope/CMF/Plone. The first is a data-oriented approach. With this, <form> designs are the best fit, as you have many pieces of information to collect about the resource. The second is a document-oriented approach, where the essence of the resource is unstructured, and the form elements simply provide metadata for that unstructured information.

Most information in organizations is unstructured, as studies show. For these cases, a rich editor like Epoz makes sense. Equally, these cases point towards a document-centric approach, rather than HTML forms.

The following table shows different aspects, and happens to give us a chance to test table editing in Epoz:

Comparing Data- and Document-Centric

  Data Document
Implementation forms iframes
Metadata form elements iframe document "head"