EtherPad

[Alan Pope]

On 9 June 2010 12:52, Chow Loong Jin <hyperair at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 11:52:35 +0100
> Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> There are some public installations already available which you can
>> experiment with.
>>

There was in fact a brief demo during the lightning talk at UDS. It
went slightly wrong because the owner of the etherpad instance (Dave
Walker) wasn't aware the demo was happening so the box became RAM
starved when everyone in the auditorium hit it at once :)

We use the Ubuntu UK LoCo etherpad that Dave setup quite heavily.
Indeed when gobby went down at UDS we switched to etherpad temporarily
so we could carry on working. The LoCo council also use it quite
heavily, and I believe the Ubuntu Manual team used it quite a bit.

> As for features, everything Gobby has, Etherpad has, and more, except that
> Etherpad seemingly doesn't have a listing of all available pads, and
> also no option for naming the pads. I'm not sure it is impossible
> though. It might just have been impractical for public Etherpad services like
> ietherpad.com.
>

Actually it has both of those features. To name a page just visit it.
For example if you visit http://pad.ubuntu-uk.org/ChowLoongJin it
doesn't (yet) exist, but whoever hits it first will have the option to
create the pad with that name. If you don't specify the name (the
default) you get a randomly generated one.

I have used two instance of etherpad (again setup by Dave) which are
'private' - that is - you require an email address/password to
authenticate before editing can begin. These are using the 'Etherpad
Pro' codebase and those will have the option to list documents.
Screenshot here:-

http://popey.com/~alan/uupc_etherpad.png

> To summarize,
> Pros:
>  * No need for external software
>  * No worries about getting blocked by firewalls
>  * Has support for rich-text and plain-text formatting
>  * Can import from and export to PDF, text, ODT and DOC formats.
>  * Has inbuilt revision control.
* Auto colour selection :)

Cheers,
Al.