MySource 4.0 WebDAV update

Today, finally, I managed to get both Windows and OS X to open and edit MS Office documents via WebDAV. It's been a real pain, but I'm finally in a position where I can start migrating all my hard-coded logic into MySource 4.0. The only problem; MySource 4.0 isn't ready for it yet.

I really need to wait until the Project system is developed before I start trying to get WebDAV working within MySource 4.0. A lot of decisions need to be made about what folders will be made available and at what URLs. I'm hoping that work on the Project system will begin next week, so I'm looking at about mid/late Feb before WebDAV integration begins.

So what are my impressions of WebDAV? Well, I think it is a fantastic idea and should allow for much easier content editing and mass uploading of content. But it does have its limits. It is really most suited to editing files (like Word Documents) rather than HTML content, which makes up most of the content in the average website. Sure, you can edit the HTML of a page, but you lose all the tools the CMS provides, like internal linking and content reuse.

I also love OS X even more now! WebDAV support in OS X is just fantastic, and is really the way I assumed all operating systems would implement WebDAV. OS X "maps" a WebDAV server to make it look like an external drive. All saving and locking is handled at the OS level, so any application on OS X can support WebDAV by doing... well, nothing. This allows me to edit text files in my favorite editor rather than a specific "WebDAV enabled" one.

The down-side? OS X loves writing "._" files everywhere, and I've needed to support these files to an extent to make sure all applications work correctly. Obviously, I don't want them written to the CMS, so I store them in a temporary directory and manipulate them there.

Windows is... different. Explorer supports WebDAV through Web Folders. You can browse a Web Folder, but you can't open and edit any file you want. The suggested way for using Web Folders and WebDAV is to copy the remote file to your local machine, edit it, and then re-upload it. You can also drag files directly into the Web Folder to upload them. To do any real editing, you need to use an application that supports editing via WebDAV itself. The OS will not do it for you.

What does this mean? Well for one thing, the number of applications you can use for editing is greatly limited. I can't, for example, edit a text file in Notepad because Notepad doesn't know how to edit a WebDAV document. I can use WebDAV enabled applications like the MS Office suite or Dreamweaver to edit content, so at least the big names have support.

The other thing that really annoyed me was that Windows, when creating a Web Folder, will send an OPTIONS request to the root of the server. I work on a shared development server, and my URL is something like delta.squiz.net/~gsherwood/webdav_server.php. However, I can't use this URL to create a Web Folder because the OPTIONS request that goes to delta.squiz.net is ignored, so Windows thinks the server is invalid. To get around this, I've had to get a new domain configured in Apache that sets the document root to my WebDAV directory. An alias has also been configured to point all traffic on my new domain to a single PHP file; my WebDAV server. It's a pain, but it works.

Bad points aside, it was Microsoft that helped me get WebDAV working in the first place. I found the MSDN article on the WebDAV LOCK method very informative. I also configured a WedDAV server running on IIS and analysed the requests that two Windows boxes were sending to each other using Ethereal (I highly recommend this approach if it is available to you). Plus, seeing a PHP app that runs on Linux integrate so closely with Windows is a beautiful sight to see, so I can't be completely against Microsoft on this one.