Instead of taking existing interfaces for various CMSes, I propose a zooming UI for adding and editing nodes. While existing concepts are easy to implement frontend wise, they totally do not fit the backend. I am a backend coder so I turn the table and propose something that's surely a formidable challenge to implement in JS/HTML but fits our backend really well.

This idea has grown out from the inline editing concepts. The problem there is that what you see as a piece of text might come from a good number of sources and it's simply not feasible so you can't simply say "take the raw version of this text, show it in a textarea let the user edit, be done". However, in most cases, if you'd print out the page and draw rectangles on the paper you could still separate out the fields in most cases.

So what we do is to allow you to zoom in the page and then these fields become visible and as you zoom on one of them, the formatters turn into a widget. Because we are zooming, it's not a problem that the edit widget takes a lot more space than the formatted version. We also can make those fields visible which do not have a corresponsing text, like a selectbox which controls colors or an "important" checkbox which also changes the styling of other fields.

So we got down to invidual controls. Inside a textarea you have [link:123]. A filter changes this to a link to node 123 and displays the title of said node as a link title. So while you see the node body in a textarea as usual, this link is not editable as such but if you zoom in, then you will see the page for node 123 and as you zoom further it also becomes editable, change its title and be done: zoom out to your original text area.

I created a very rough mockup of how an uneditable date becomes an editable one as you zoom in. Instead of the select boxes blowing up the text should have become even smaller but then the text would be totally unreadable. Note that this is not a problem in the zooming world, as there the change would be much more gradual.

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