Quanta Plus FAQ
1. What is Quanta Plus?
From http://quanta.sourceforge.net/:
Quanta Plus is a web development tool for the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE). Quanta Plus is designed for rapid web development and is quickly becoming a mature editor with a number of great features.
Our objective remains to create the very best web development tool anywhere. We realize that we will need many more people active to accomplish this so we are in the process of developing enhancements geared toward making it easy for web developers to customize, extend and enhance Quanta Plus. Then we will be asking you, the web developers, to contribute your feature enhancements. We will organize these so that Quanta Plus web developers can find just the resources, extensions and custom plug-ins they need to be the most kick butt developers ever!
2. How do I install Quanta Plus?
2.1 Quanta Plus binary packages?
Most Linux vendors ship with Quanta Plus packages. Simply use your vendor's installation software to install it. If your vendor does not provide Quanta Plus, then search Goggle.com.
2.2 Quanta Plus source code
There are two versions of the Quanta Plus source code:
- The 3.x formal releases are available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/quanta/ and
- The CVS tree, which is available from anoncvs.kde.org.
For formal releases, it is just a download, et cetera. For CVS tree:
- cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.kde.org:/home/kde login
- cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.kde.org:/home/kde co quanta
When prompted for a password, just press Enter. This will create a directory called "quanta" as a subdirectory of the directory you ran the above commands in.
2.3 Compiling Quanta Plus
An assumption is made that you have the knowledge and ability to find and install any missing libraries that you may encounter. Basically, you need the headers from KDE, Qt, and GCC. If you don't know what was just said, then try the steps below and, if it doesn't work for you, then find yourself a Linux geek that can help.
Type the following in a shell and see what you get:
- test `echo $TDEDIR` && echo "yes" || echo "noKDE"
- test `echo $QTDIR` && echo "yes" || echo "noQT"
If you don't get two yes answers, then you need to find the location of the one that failed and export it to your current shell environment.
Then it is as simple as:
make -f Makefile.cvs (Only necessary if you're doing from CVS, but it is a good idea to do so anyway.)
./configure
make
make install (Run this command as root.)
2.4 I get error X when running ./configure
Please read 2.3 carefully again and make certain that you have exported the $TDEDIR and $QTDIR environment variables. This is the most likely cause. Aside from that, if you are missing something very important, then configure will tell you what it needs.
2.5 I get error X when compiling
Please read 2.3 and make certain that whatever libraries make is looking for are installed on your machine. How and where to get these libraries is beyond the scope of this FAQ.
3. How do I do X? Can Quanta Plus do X?
3.1. How can I open/edit a file on a remote server?
Quanta Plus uses KIO for its file operations. To whit, an e-mail from our benefactor:
Try this. Open the file open dialog... you can do this in the file name, but it's even cooler if you use the directory drop-down up top on the dialog. Enter this: ftp://user@mydomain.com and hit enter. It will prompt you for a password after which it will fill the file dialog with the available files and folders on the site location. You and now navigate your site like you were looking at your local directory, open and save files on line.
Two additional facts here. First if you are using projects you can set your project preview option to directly preview from the site and then see PHP files with data live as they would behave on site. Second, this is made possible by KDE's KIO slaves. So any functional KIO slave you have installed brings this same functionality. Try kio_fish for secure file access as well as other slaves for Samba, scp and other protocols.
--
Eric Laffoon
That should about cover it.
3.2. Can I run program X from Quanta Plus?
Yes! Quanta Plus will run almost anything you want as an action. More from our benefactor:
Does Quanta Plus Shell? Hey, we're open source! Quanta Plus has shelled since around version 1.0.1. You can run virtually any program you can run from the command line with Quanta Plus with a wide variety of options.
To run HTMLtidy do the following:
- On the menu go to Settings>Configure Actions.
- In the dialog click New button and give it a name and icon
- Select the script tab and put tidy -i in the script line
- Select either selected text or current document for input
- Select your output such as "Replace current document"
- On the error tab select "Message window"
- Close the dialog and select Settings>Configure Toolbars
- Place the new action on the toolbar of your choice
Now you can run tidy and if there are errors and you have the message window open it will give you errors. If you have kaptain installed (http://kaptain.sourceforge.net) you can even set parameters for each run.
Enjoy!
--
Eric Laffoon
4. Is there any documentation for Quanta Plus?
Yes, however most are slightly outdated. They are being worked on currently. Would you like to help?
5. How can I help Quanta Plus development?
I thought you'd never ask! ;-)
From Eric:
We would be remiss not to point out that Quanta Plus is being built with volunteer effort. Many people feel they cannot contribute to the open source cause for one reason or another. Probably the greatest being a feeling they do not have the skills. This documentation is writing in HTML... so if you can do that you can help. What is the open source cause? It is giving back to the community to grow something bigger than we could on our own, but it is also a shining hope for those people around the world where getting software for free is not an option, it is the option.
We believe in the cause!
If you would like to help out contact Eric Laffoon (sequitur@kde.org).
6. Where is Quanta Plus going from here?
We have released Quanta Plus 3.1.3 and are now in preparation for 3.2. Our objective remains to create the very best web development tool anywhere. We realize that we will need many more people actively developing Quanta Plus to accomplish this, so we are in the process of developing enhancements geared toward making it easy for web developers to customize, extend, and enhance Quanta Plus. Then we will be asking you, the web developers, to contribute your feature enhancements. We will organize these so that Quanta Plus web developers can find just the resources, extensions, and custom plug-ins they need to be the most kick butt developers ever!
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