Musings

Ecto 2.0

Gee. It’s been a while since I posted something. Truth be told, I’ve been insanely busy, and the madness won’t let up for at least a week or two.

But I did want to to point out that this is being posted using a beta version of Ecto 2.0.

“Ho hum,” you say. But that would be wrong. Ecto 2.0, among its other, doubtless extremely useful features, has local text filters. Say you have a bunch of text filters installed on your blog. You can choose your post to be to be filtered with one of those filters when it is published. But, when previewed in Ecto, this had no particular effect (except for the standard “convert linebreaks” filter). All you would see was the unfiltered text.

But now you can create plugins for Ecto which process your text before it is previewed. The plugin applied your text is selected based on your choice of MT text filter. So, obviously, I could create a plugin which runs my text through itex2MML before displaying it. That would be really nifty (even niftier if WebCore supported MathML).

But even craftier things are now possible. How about a plugin which runs your post through the text filter of your choice and then runs the result through the validator? Instant client-side validation, in addition to text filtering!

Someone stop me before I drop what I’m doing and pull an all-nighter coding Ecto plugins!