The Block Plugin
After reading this guide, you will be able to:
- Understand what Blocks are and how to use them
- use the Block API to create, modify and
- Extend Blocks with custom implementations
This guide is currently work-in-progress.
1 What are Aloha Blocks?
Aloha Blocks (Blocks) are non-editable areas of a website, which have some properties being editable through the Aloha user interface. Blocks can appear inside editables or outside editables, both inside inline elements and inside block-level elements.
Blocks themselves can contain editables and other blocks.
Some use cases for blocks include:
- Displaying a vCard of a person from an address book.
- Displaying product prices in continuous text. Here, the user should not be able to edit the prices.
- Provide “templates” like a two-column block
- TODO: add more use-cases
Blocks are not fully implemented yet. See TODO LINK TO WIKI for the current roadmap.
2 Enabling the Block Plugin
3 Creating Blocks
Aloha BLocks is implemented as a plugin called block
, which is part of the common
bundle.
Thus, in order to use blocks, you need to load the common/block and common/contenthandler plugin (Blocks interact with the contenthandler plugin).
After the plugin is loaded, you can create blocks.
3.1 Using jQuery
jQuery('.some-selector').alohaBlock();
3.2 Using Configuration
4 Interacting with Blocks
- Getting “Block” instance (BlockManager.get or so…)
- attr(…) explained
5 APIs and Extension Points
- Writing custom Blocks
- Writing custom Editors
6 Writing your own Block
7 Internals
8 Future Work
9 Changelog
- July 7, 2011: Initial version by Sebastian Kurfürst and Christopher Hlubek