Attribution

[michiel]

Requested by Ferry Boender.

Many blogging software don't have any way to formally attribute (pieces of) posts to their sources. This makes it unnecessarely hard to quote your sources for a post (such as contributors, other blogs, books, scientific papers, etc).

Special markup could be added to the posting markup allowing one to attribute sources. Take this post for instance:

"According to research, hydrogen-fuel engines are not yet

ready for mass deployment on the market"[1]

[1] Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/Wiki/Hydrogen_engine

Specifications:

• It should be possible to specifiy the following information per source:

Name (author, blog or website name) URL (if empty don't display anything) Title (Title of the paper, blog post title, website article, etc)

[michiel]

Do you have any idea on how to implement this for the user? How would one enter those attributions ?

As soon as I have an idea about that I can technically implement it.

One idea I can think of is that you can add 'sources' to your post in text input fields and let mvblog number them so you can put [<number>] in your post to link to that source. But if you have an idea about how to do it in the interface feel free to help me get an idea here.

[fboender]

Replying to michiel:

Even though WordPress? is a piece of shit, in this case you could copy their picture-insert behaviour. It works very well. Below the post input textarea you'd have an couple of input fields like so:

Attributions:

Author URL Title

1: [ ][ ][ ] [Insert]

You can just start writing a post. When you need to insert an attribution, you just fill in the fields, and press 'Insert'. It then inserts the required HTML code at the current cursor position in the textarea, clears the input fields and sets the attribution number to one higher.

I believe this will offer the most practical work flow for authors. (And if it doesn't, it will at least for me :-D)

[michiel]

first rough shot at it

[michiel]

This patch can insert the attribution at the current cursor position. What needs to be done is build some sort of buffer to hold the url etc so we can append it to the post right before we commit it to the database. The javascript function as it is now will messup your post.