New beta feature for Reger.com: the ability to upload an XML Schema file to create a custom log type. Yeah, it's geeky right now.
It's not nearly ready for prime time yet, but it does serve as a proof of concept. Elements are extracted from an XML Schema file and converted to fields in a custom log. ComplexTypes are not yet supported. We have to implement a Container field type to allow for the infinite nesting of XML Schema. And we have to add a container layer into the field layout engine. The way it'll work is this: complexTypes will be container box objects in the UI and the Elements within them will be restricted to their box. A Book object, for example, will be a container and will have Title, Author and Publish Date fields within it.
Click here for the demo. Turn up your volume... the audio is rather crappy. You'll need a browser with Flash installed.
This is just a start, but an important start. The goal is to remove all of the geeky stuff and allow anybody to share a log type quickly and easily. Once that happens then the world of microcontent, microformats, datablogging, structured blogging and web 2.0 is in the hands of the people! It'll take a lot of work to get there, but we're on it! And we're thankful for the community of people providing feedback on the concept: Bob Wyman, Marc Canter, Danny Ayers, Phillip Pearson and others. Oh, and thanks to Jon Udell for throwing down the challenge to be able to import log types as XML Schema earlier this year. He was so unimpressed when we exported log types to XML Schema. Such one-way is so 1999. He wanted the two-way, complete circle... and I agreed with him. Well, we're not yet there, but we're making signifigant progress with this feature. The outbound XML Schema and inbound XML Schema will need to be cleaned up to play nicely together. And, as mentioned above, we need much stronger XML Schema support.
Heading to Doc with Terp