WYSIWYG editor

General Discussion
1

Hi,

I read that the new KB comes with a WYSIWYG editor, so I wonder if we may see one for the forum. Probably one which also supports the option.

I don’'t want to see more options, so B I U URL (and CODE) are fine, so we could forego the “Preview” button. There is also the attach file option, but this one does usually not require a preview.

A better spell checker was already requested in the JS.com forum.

LG

edited: some URL’'s: http://www.cmsreview.com/WYSIWYG/OpenSource/directory.html

2

Hey LG,

Yep, a GUI editor is coming for the forums. We’'ll also be making a number of improvements to the post form. We realize people spend a lot of time on that page so we want it to be as enjoyable as possible.

We’'ll deploy a beta version of it in less than a month – looking forward to your feedback!

Cheers,

–Bill

3

Hi Bill,

most users write some text and this takes long and some of them think even about what they are writing so I think you will not really speed up the time the people spend on the “Post Message” page. If you make it more comfortable they may spend even more time there ;).

I did forget to mention the emotions - I usually use the Spark emotions picker to get the ascii code for

LG

4

LG,

We’‘re looking at building in an auto-save feature (a la gmail) so that even if users spend a lot of time there, they won’'t be in danger of losing their message.

Cheers,

–Bill

5

Auto-save? How does this work (not using gmail)? Cause after so many years in forums i got used to press Ctrl-A Ctrl-S before posting This feature will save everything you type in real time? Like my email program does

6

It’‘ll work much like gmail – as you type, it’'ll save in the background or you can click the “Save” button and force a save. The goal is to have the system never lose the message.

Cheers,

–Bill

7

Hi Bill,

this sounds like a flash plugin on an applet, which I both do not really like. And posting the data every minute seems not to be effective, or do you post just the delta data?

LG

8

It’'ll likely be javascript. Have you ever used gmail? Its very effective at saving your data.

Cheers,

Alex

9

Hi Alex,

I did never use gmail, and I’‘m quite sure that you can’'t read or write local files using just javascript.

LG

10

You’'re right i think you would need something else like flash to write local files. But you can use javascript to save it back to the server which is what gmail does.

Alex

11

Guys,

It is not implemented by flash or an applet. We’‘re using AJAX (so purely Javascript). We post data if there are changes and it’'ll be efficient.

Cheers,

–Bill

12

it2000 wrote:

I read that the new KB comes with a WYSIWYG editor, so I wonder if we may see one for the forum.

– so what do you all think of the new editor? autosave? preview? Had any problems with it?

AJ

13

Hi Aaron,

I prefer a WYSIWIG editor. [ code ] is still not in the Text Markup Help while one must escape [ with a \ to get it displayed, otherwise it will be displayed like as an URL. So one get’'s totally confused about code[/code] while without spaces it looke like as no trailing / C O D E folllows.

LG

14

just need to test whether preview looks like the post - the preview shows an open bracket, code and a closing bracket.

15

A wysiwyg editor is comin very soon - it’‘s actually disabled currently on this site because the conversions between html -> text markup syntax isn’'t quite ready yet. It will be visible on IE 5.5+ and Firefox/Mozilla; other browsers such as Safari and Opera will only have the plain text editor available to them.

I think there may be a few issue with the current code tag, however you could try using the (undocumented currently) code macro which actually supports syntax highlighting other languages. The syntax is:

\

import java.io.InputStream;
\

Regards,

Bruce Ritchie

16

Thanks Bruce,

maybe one can use the preferences to select the editor one wants to use? And the forum administrator has the option to decide which reply forms are offered (old school, this one, WYSIWYG).

Hi Aaron,

I see a very bad problem with the new editor. It takes ages to load. If I click “Reply” I want to reply and not wait 10 (ten) seconds to wait for the page to load.

I did wonder how this could happen …

http://www.jivesoftware.org/community/post2!reply.jspa?messageID=… is loaded in 0.5 seconds, so it can’'t be the problem of your server.

http://www.jivesoftware.org/community/dwr/engine.js has a TTL of 5 seconds, then one should refetch it.

http://www.jivesoftware.org/community/images/tabs/tabs_bg.gif has a TTL of 60 seconds.

So the browser must verify that all images, css and JS are still up to date and this seems to takes so long, maybe the JS scripts themselves load other JS scripts which makes it even slower.

==> As long as loading takes so long I want to edit my preferences and select a reply form which loads fast.

LG

17

==> As long as loading takes so long I want to edit my preferences and select a reply form which loads fast.

Second that. Almost forgotting what i want to reply

With old system it was loading faster, but you had to wait to quote something. Now it quotes immediately. In sum maybe it’'s the same time.

18

Hi,

http://www.jivesoftware.org/builds/wildfire/docs/latest/changelog.html contains JM issues surrounded by brackets, if one copies them here and click post it will look like:

  • Upgraded to JDK 1.5.0_07.

If one posts an expetion of the error log which also contains brackets it will look like:

2006.07.04 17:20:45 org.jivesoftware.wildfire.spi.ConnectionManagerImpl.startClientListeners(Connect ionManagerImpl.java:206) Could not setup a server socket

java.net.BindException: Address already in use

==> I do not like the new url markup code, it makes a lot of the current threads look ugly and also new threads look bad.

LG

19

LG,

We’‘ll work on the performance issue and see what we can do to improve it - extending the ttl to a more reasonable value. Once the gui editor is enabled you will indeed have the option to choose which editor to use by default. There is and will not be a built-in option for administrators to use the ‘‘old style’’ post form, though they will have the option to disable features such as the inline spell checker or the wysiwyg gui editor. We are leaving the existing WebWork actions in place so current installations will have the option to replace the ‘‘new’’ post page with the post page from the 5.0.x release, though of course they will no longer have access to all the new features we’'ve added.

Regards,

Bruce Ritchie

20

Hi Bruce,

I’'m missing the BOLD, ITALIC and UNDERLINE buttons to change the currently selected text, writing *, + or _ manually before and after the interesting text is lame.

LG