What is it ???

It is a content management system inspired by Ward Cunningham's Wiki idea. Whereas most wiki implementations (and there are hundreds) use a textarea in a web page for editing, with a command language for formatting, Cozmos uses a full installed 'Thick' application for editing and pushes back the pages using an extended web technology called WebDAV.  Like Wikis, Cozmos separates content from presentation/style.  Unlike Wikis the actual language of the content is  HTML which is the language of the web itself.

Don't be scared though, some pretty standard tools are used for editing:

If you're a windows user, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word are tools you might have installed already that work.
If you're a Windows, Mac or Linux user, the Mozilla Foundations free tool SeaMonkey will do.
In time, we hope FireFox too gets a new menu item - 'Edit' - to allow for the seamless transition from browsing a page, to editing it.

Look at this flow from browse to edit to browse again. Click on each screen shot see them full sized:

before  during  after


Why?

As with most open source, an itch is being scratched.  Its not uncommon to hear that people are sick of editing in textareas in web pages, using obscure languages for *bold* /italics/ and _underline_ (it is not even if those three are standardized over all Wiki implementations).  Even the push in the Web2.0 era to Rich editing components in web pages does not placate all. Thus this real editor solution is being developed after many years of discussion inside ThoughtWorks. Cozmos is going to spawn multiple implementations of the same idea. The PHP community (with PhpMesh) are poised to deliver a quick solution, and the Rby/Rails communit will do the same. In the end though perhaps this "Diki" (DAV Wiki - geddit?) idea may stick. Though there's some suggestion that it should be coined Daviki rather tha Diki.

Quick Start

Install the Cozmos web app into Apache's Tomcat server

Alpha verions of Cozmos available here - http://cozmos.codehaus.org/wars/

(Mortbay's Jetty will work too, but you must  have JETTY_HOME set)

For SeaMonkey editing, download and patch it

1) Go get a recent version of SeaMonkey

Unfortunately, you have to make a modification to SeaMonkey after installing it.

2) Install it the normal way.

3) Go to to a directory called 'chrome' that contains a file called 'comm.jar' in a command shell

4) Do jar -xf comm.jar content/editor/editorApplicationOverlay.js

5) Edit that file in Notepad, Textpad, Vi, Emacs etc..

6) Change ....
  function editPage(url, launchWindow, delay)
  {
  // Always strip off "view-source:" and #anchors
  url = url.replace(/^view-source:/, "").replace(/#.*/, "");
  to ....

  function editPage(url, launchWindow, delay)
  {
  // Always strip off "view-source:" and #anchors
  url = url.replace(/^view-source:/, "").replace(/#.*/, "");
  if (url.substr(0,4) == "http")
  {
    if (url.indexOf("?") > 0)
    {
      url = url + "&editMode=true";   
    }
    else
    {
      url = url + "?editMode=true";       
    }
  }

7) Do jar -uf comm.jar content/editor/editorApplicationOverlay.js

Now your SeaMonkey has been modified. It allows the server side Cozmos to recognise the differences betweeen a page request from the browser and one from the composer (editor) sides of SeaMonkey.  We hope to see the SeaMonkey team build in such functionality in future.

It is important to note that there are no permissions presently for editing of pages.  This will change in future versions of Cozmos.

We will supply a script to modify SeaMonkey for you in future versions.

Edit a page on the site with MS Word

While browsing the Cozmos application site (http://localhost:8080/cozmos?) with Internet Explorer,  chose "Edit page with Microsoft Word" from the File menu.  This used to be mapped to Ctrl-E (pity its not).  When finished choose the regular Save Icon.

Edit a page on the site with SeaMonkey

While browsing the Cozmos application site (http://localhost:8080/cozmos?) with SeaMonkey, hit Ctrl-E (Apple-E for Mac users) and make changes to the page.  Hit the "Publish"  icon in the toolbar to push the changes back to the server.

What next ?

Permissions for pages / secure login for changes
Linking to Subversion for automatic storage of page history
Begging of numberous Mozilla committers/leads to make changes to some components they own (Firefox, SeaMonkey, Composer)

Project INFO

People, repos, lists, sites ... all detailed here:
http://xircles.codehaus.org/projects/cozmos

    Cozmos depends significantly on two pre-existing open source projects.
    SiteMesh is the best open source component you never heard of,
    and webdav-servlet is a very flexible value add for Java's web capability.

This work is licensed under a some minimal BSD derivative