These features have been available in beta form since January, so thanks to all of the authors who helped us by trying them out and providing helpful comments. We've incorporated some of their comments as well as the results of a usability study and have now released the features on our main site

Microsoft Word Importer

Despite the fact that CNXML has been around for a couple years now, most of the world continues to use other tools for writing content. We're OK with this. Really. In recognition of this fact, one of our goals is to provide importers for other formats to allow authors to create modules from content they've already written. Since most of the world uses Microsoft Word we decided to start there.

Our Word importer makes it easy to create modules from Word documents by transforming them into CNXML. It uses Word's built-in styles to automatically markup items like sections, links, and figures. You can also download a document template that has styles for many other CNXML tags. See this guide for more details on Using Microsoft Word to Create Connexions Modules

Enhanced Edit-In-Place

We originally implemented Edit-In-Place for small, quick edits to published modules. It allowed authors to make markup changes on individual paragraphs instead of having to edit the whole module at once. The feature was a success, but we began to get requests for enhancements:

'Add' and 'Delete' functionality

Perhaps the most commonly requested feature was to be able to add new paragraphs and delete existing ones.

More editable tags

Authors wanted to be able to edit things like examples, lists, and figures in addition to paragraphs.

Use in workspaces

Several authors wanted to know why this easy-to-use editor was only available for published modules and not in workspaces.

The newly enhanced Edit-In-Place adds all of these features as well as an extensive help system for editing CNXML. Editing Modules has instructions on how to use these features.

The Future

There's still work to be done to make it even easier to create and edit modules. Some things in the works:

• More import formats: XHTML, LaTeX, Wolfram's Publicon
• The ability to split a Word document into multiple modules
• Easier figure uploading
• Edit-In-Place for tables and definitions