Quick Start Guide

So you've just downloaded Editize and you're anxious to see what it can do, right? In this section of the manual, we'll endeavour to get you up and running as quickly as possible.

What You Need

In addition to this Editize distribution, you need a license file to use Editize on your site.

License Files

Editize will happily run for testing purposes on your own machine. Technically speaking, to use the free distribution of Editize, you can only put it on a machine that is accessible as localhost, or that has an IP address of 127.0.0.1.

To host Editize on other machines (e.g. a publically accessible Web server, or another computer in your private network), you must obtain a license file for the host on which you want to install Editize. For example, to run Editize on the www.mycompany.com Web site, you would need a license file for that host (editize.mycompany.com.lic). To run Editize on a private network server, you need a private network license file (editize.lic).

You may obtain a free, 30-day license for testing purposes or purchase a permanent license for your site from the Editize Web site (click Download to obtain a trial license).

What You Need to Know

Editize is a Web component designed to let Web developers create more intuitive interfaces for editing HTML documents in Web-based content management systems.

Since Editize was designed as a drop-in replacement for the HTML <textarea> tag, getting the most out of Editize begins with knowing how to build useful Web applications with the <textearea> tag and the server-side scripting language of your choice.

If you've never written a server-side script or a database-driven Website before, there are some things you need to learn before you can put Editize to work for you. We would recommend picking up a copy of Build Your Own Database Driven Website using PHP & MySQL, an excellent book that will gently guide you through the process of server-side scripting with PHP and MySQL. You can even download the first 4 chapters for free from the book's Website!

What next

The various APIs for Editize are designed so that you can simply replace any <textarea> tag with some brief code to place an Editize field in its place. In server-side languages that support it (e.g. ASP.NET), this code will take the form of an XML tag.

Available APIs

The following server-side APIs for Editize are included in this distribution. Select the one that best fits your needs to learn the exact code that will allow you to use Editize on your site:

If you do not have access to a supported server-side language on your Web server, you can use the JavaScript API instead. This API should work with any server-side language, including ColdFusion, JSP, and Perl.

Additional APIs will be released for free depending on user demand. Let us know what you need!