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#37 2005-02-21 20:22:55
- andjules
- Member
- From: toronto
- Registered: 2004-10-20
- Posts: 44
Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
just a post to get this topic moving again now that RC3 is out and 1.0 may become a reality.
I hope those with philosophical views can start another post. Agree or disagree, some of us would like to give our clients a more ‘word-processor’-like input solution. I love textile, i think it is elegant, props where are props are due, etc. But let’s move on to the task at hand.
observations:
a) tinyMCE, fckEditor are the most lightweight WYSIWYG editors and thus probably most to the liking of the kind of person who would choose textpattern. widgEditor is nice, but from my testing has a little ways to go (fairly buggy/unpredictable). fckEditor currently has a bug where dropdown scrollbars don’t ‘undraw’ on the mac, but i’m sure that will be cleaned up soon. From what i’ve read, those who comb the output of these editors looking for the cleanest XHTML seem to like fckEditor.
b) Expression Engine uses javascript shortcuts for editing. not bad, and obviously much ‘lighter’ than a full WYSIWYG editor.
c) Expression Engine also has a the ability to define a ‘stand alone entry form’ which may be the best approach to implementing a WYSIWYG editor. Rather than start hacking txp’s nice admin interface, it might be best to let us each design our own edit/entry form that submits to the right place in the right format.
thougths?
Last edited by andjules (2005-02-21 20:25:11)
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
Why not use a clientside tool with XMLRPC API and the like ? A plugin exist for that I think.
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#39 2005-02-21 20:40:42
- andjules
- Member
- From: toronto
- Registered: 2004-10-20
- Posts: 44
Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
Jeremie,
a ‘thick client’ might be the right answer for some, but certainly not for a lot of corporate client situations. for one, many do not have admin accounts on their own machines, so installing software just adds another barrier. moreover, dumb as it sounds, it’s pretty much a truism in the corporate world that ‘software’ requires training, but ‘web pages’ do not (no matter how complex the web app!).
XMLRPC might be an ok answer for a standalone web form, but it seems like overkill given that a standalone form and the textpattern install will be on the same server in most cases.
Last edited by andjules (2005-02-21 20:42:08)
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#40 2005-02-22 19:53:00
- davidm
- Member
- From: Paris, France
- Registered: 2004-04-27
- Posts: 719
Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
Jeremie, exactly what I suggested earlier about XMLRPC. But Andjules is right, we consultants have specific needs regarding corporate client situations.
It might me too heavy a solution. It’s one thing to train 5 people, another to train 200. You have to keep it simple or the cost / complexity might blow up in your face…
I know EE quite well since I build sites with it. The javascript approach might be the right one, as I initially suggested in the first message. My idea was to build JS textile shortcuts, also very much like the “wiki approach” adopted by Dotclear.
The thing is, I don’t have the skill to build this tool…thus the initial post about a user-friendly textile editor…
.: Retired :.
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
I’ve been tinkering with my own version of this WYSIWYG editor. It’s just a simple tag that you ad to the head of the page, and it turns the default textarea into a “MS Word” style, standards based, editor.
Textile is easy to us, because we’re all (mostly) tech savvy. Joe-Grandma who has just begun to get comfortable with MS Word, is not. I personally don’t want to hand-hold people through various methods to do this and that.
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
> davidm wrote:
> It might me too heavy a solution. It’s one thing to train 5 people, another to train 200. You have to keep it simple or the cost / complexity might blow up in your face…
On that point, I go down another road, wich is admin plugin/custom and localized TXP/Textile help.
I pretty sure that even grandma can use Textile if the help is good and well written. Well in fact grandma is more able to use it, because she has decent “old school” education and she probably know more about correct semantic – web semantic is just article grammar, nothing more – that your average fresh from school yuppie punk :p
I agree that a plugin to have some kind of graphic thing, or even wysiwyg would be nice. But I would fight fiercely anyone trying to get Dean, Zem or any other devoted dvlp around to move this up the todo list, there are far – imnsho – more important big things to do… let’s say, privilege granularity for example, or servoo import/export — wich is another way or achieving this, and in some case like the big corporate adoption a better way.
If someone want to do it, I will test and debug it with pleasure. But I don’t think all people asking for it have any clues whatsoever of the complexity of such a thing to make it crossplateform, and light, and fast, and secure, and robust, and able to be localized.
Or you could screw the crossplateform and take the XUL road… that might get us quite a nice tool, indeed :-D
> I know EE quite well since I build sites with it. The javascript approach might be the right one, as I initially suggested in the first message. My idea was to build JS textile shortcuts, also very much like the “wiki approach” adopted by Dotclear.
That is less overkill and has another use (and on that one I think it’s definitely a priority) : the typographic engine. Aka helping the author to write good english (or french, or whatever) by using all these needed characters difficult to produce with a common keyboard.
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
>I pretty sure that even grandma can use Textile if the help is good
>and well written. Well in fact grandma is more able to use it,
>because she has decent “old school” education and she probably
>know more about correct semantic – web semantic is just article
>grammar, nothing more – that your average fresh from school yuppie
>punk :p
Sounds good on paper, but in practice this fails miserably. Trying to teach people different ways to accomplish the same thing causes issues that I’de rather not deal with.
While textile may be intuitive to persons like myself. It is not so easy for those for whom computers are mere basic, appliances. Also, while trying to help someone over the phone, it’s much easier to tell them, see that tilted letter I thingie? Click that. vs “now type an underscore” (insert sound of them typing the word, underscore) followed by much head knashing.
Being involved in web design / development / tech, I’ve begun to realize that people are inherently stupid. If they know one way, let them continue doing it that way. Anything else will confuse them.
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
Okay, here’s one idea.
How about an editor which combines textile and the preview all in one form? Within a set number of words from the cursor, text will appear with Textile formatting exposed, and beyond that, it’s rendered. Use a similar method as the Blogger editor and some liveRequests to make it work.
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#45 2005-02-28 02:10:03
- davidm
- Member
- From: Paris, France
- Registered: 2004-04-27
- Posts: 719
Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
Nardo just mailed me a GREAT tip : he found a Textile java shortcut developped for Drupal !
You can test and download TexBar on Michael Geary’s blog
I’ll look into it see if I am able to port this to TextPattern. If not, I’ll request you coders to take a shot at this !
Well done nardo :-))
.: Retired :.
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
is it impossible to get to the second page of this post or is it just me?
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
Hmm… Appears page 2 is broken.
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
Yeah, page 2 is messed up somehow. I can get to it once in a rare while. So if anyone sees this…
David, I’m glad you like the TextBar. (BTW, it’s JavaScript, not Java.) If no one else ports it to Textpattern I will. It was next on my list after Drupal anyway; I just needed it for Drupal for a site at work. Maybe this weekend if I get some time—it looks really easy, just a few lines added to txp_article.php.
-Mike
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