[gedit-list] Help with external tools plugin

[Micah Carrick <email micahcarrick com>]

Hello.

I'm switching to gedit for both web development and C/GTK+ development. 
I'm trying to setup the external tools plugin to allow me to go directly 
to the PHP manual's function reference for the word at the cursor. The 
help says that the "Output" is passed to the command as stdin. I tried 
to write a bash script using the read command to read this into a 
variable and construct the URL for the php help but the read result is 
empty.

#!/bin/bash
$p = read
firefox http://www.php.net/search.php?lang=en&show=quickref&pattern=$p

I don't think I understand how to get "Output" from the external tools 
plugin. Any help would be appreciated.

A second thing: I had change a setting using the gconf-editor in order 
to allow gedit to open files via FTP with write-access. Are FTP files 
opened read-only for security reasons or what?

- Micah