Lack of WYSIWYG Editor is the #1 stopper for using of flarum

boc

Hello.
This is feedback section, so here is my feedback.
Now I manage more than 10 communities on a different forum engine. But I really enjoy watching the evolution of Flarum.
Lack of WYSIWYG Editor is the #1 stopper for using of flarum for me on my communities.
Markdown is a very nice thing for us developers, but for the rest of the 99% of people, it's just hell. Markdown is terribly inconvenient and complicated if you're not a techie.
It was very sad to see that the WYSIWYG editor was not included in the roadmap.

So I just wanted to share that the advent of WYSIWYG will be the turning point after which I will start using flarum in production for my communities and will recommend it to others.

Without WYSIWYG, there is no chance of wide distribution of the flarum in the wild.

Thank you devs for all your effort.

TB54

boc There is an extension which works pretty well (amost no bugs): https://discuss.flarum.org/d/26455-wysiwyg-rich-text-editor

I personnaly like to have the choice, specially as a WYSIWYG Editor sometimes messes with paragraphs or spaces between lines (in case of lists, titles...), and that markdown is then the best way to handle it (markdown + instant preview is the best combo for me - sadly it's not possible when you write the first message of a thread).

But people who prefer rich text (indeed more accessible for newbies) can activate the extension as default in their profile. Maybe, if you're afraid people miss it, you could ask on the extension page an option in the admin panel to activate it as default for anyone.

Valeyard

boc Flarum natively supports both Markdown AND BBcode. Making a guide for mine is on my to-do list.

With a site supporting dark/light theme, giving users too much ease of control over colour in a rich-text editor leads to frequent problems (such as they paste in pre-coloured text into a rich-text editors and then hit "post" or "reply" and it looks wrong). For that reason I'm glad there's no colour option in the editor itself, and if there was I would remove it.

Really the only way to have a proper rich text editor with any forum that supports light and dark mode is if the editor REMOVES colour on paste-in and does not contain the ability to select an inappropriate pallet from the GUI. Fortunately the existing extension does this flawlessly. I just tested it out, and I've added it to mine.

boc Without WYSIWYG, there is no chance of wide distribution of the flarum in the wild.

With all due respect, you're dead-wrong. As @tankerkiller125 mentioned the intention is to allow different Rich-Text editors to be developed by the community. There's already one and it's very unlikely to go neglected as mentioned above.

Once you put something into core you can't remove it. There will never be a second option - ever. So I fully understand and appreciate why it's not in core.

boc

I know about the extensions. There were many of them, they appear and die one after another. My post was specifically about flarum's official WYSIWYG support, not extensions.

tankerkiller125

boc There are currently no plans for official WYSIWYG editors, in fact we specifically created the extenders required to add WYSIWYG editors and other things of that nature specifically because we want the community to be able to do it, and we have no official plans to add it ourselves.

There are several reasons for not doing it officially and it basically comes down to the following:

Maintenance is complex
Inclusion increases the JS bundle size (sometimes by 2-3x!)
One WYSIWYG editor might work great for one community but not another
Extensibility for already existing WYSIWYG editors is generally poor/hard to implement

I'm not saying that it will never be an official thing, but at least as of now it likely won't be an official extension for many years to come (if it ever does come)

luceos

boc it is very likely that the rich text extension, if it ever becomes undermaintained, would be adopted by the Friends of Flarum or even Blomstra. If you like what it does, fear for this specific extension to "die" really shouldn't hold you back from using Flarum.

askvortsov

boc Which issues are you facing with https://discuss.flarum.org/d/26455-wysiwyg-rich-text-editor?

010101

tankerkiller125

Ditto. And although I love and appreciate all attempts so far, all WYSIWYG type extension attempts so far have had quirks. There's some really cool extensions out there for Flarum that you get used to and if a WYSIWYG extension breaks or conflicts with just one of them, it's a real bummer. 😮‍💨

I've gone back and forth, but I am back to using the plain markdown editor.

I understand the periodic desire for WYSIWYG especially for forums where you have members who have never used Markdown and don't understand why when they accidentally typed # hello it became huge text. 😆 Then I have to explain to them... so, the editor supports markdown, this is why that happened, blah blah blah. And/or, I'll have a user from time to time who just cannot understand the markdown link format.

Although I get the desire and empathize, the plain editor is much more lightweight and typically compatible with all/most other extensions out there for Flarum. I think Flarum would have had to START with a WYSIWYG editor... from the very beginning. That way as extensions were built they would be compatible and there'd be less quirks. But, that wasn't what the creators wanted at the time.

In short, be careful what you wish for (compatibility issues / slowness / quirks). And, there's the already mentioned rich text extension which is very close to WYSIWYG.

boc

Valeyard I'm sorry, but you completely misread my post. I didn't say anything about "rich text". WYSIWYG doesn't mean "rich text" or "color" or anything else. WYSIWYG is What You See Is What You Get and nothing else. This means that users see the formatting exactly as it will be in the message, and not in the form of plain text incomprehensible to them mixed with asterisks and squiggles. No one asked here to add any "colorful" features. WYSIWYG is just a preview right in the text input field, that's all. In all other aspects, it can have exactly the same functionality that is currently available in the editor and nothing more, so it won't interfere with dark theme in any way.

TB54

Valeyard With a site supporting dark/light theme, giving users too much ease of control over colour in a rich-text editor leads to frequent problems (such as they paste in pre-coloured text into a rich-text editors and then hit "post" or "reply" and it looks wrong). For that reason I'm glad there's no colour option in the editor itself, and if there was I would remove it.

Well, as much as I find Rich Text satisfying enough, for that specific thing I would be glad to see it proposed as an option - the consequence is not that I don't use color, just that I have to do it manually each time with bbcodes.

Walys

When I arrive to Flarum,my thoughts were similar.
"There is no WYSIWYG Editor for default and it is only available via plugin and it is unofficial."

In the end, I have not installed it in my community and working only with Markdown + Composer Preview Plugin.
And I don't miss it.

Valeyard

boc I'm sorry, but you completely misread my post. I didn't say anything about "rich text". WYSIWYG doesn't mean "rich text" or "color" or anything else. WYSIWYG is What You See Is What You Get and nothing else.

Rich Text Editors and WYSIWYG Editors are almost synonyms with what you're talking about. The only appreciable difference is that WYSIWYG should look 100% like the post output, whereas a Rich Text Editor may have some subtle difference, or it may still allow you to see the mark-up code that you write yourself (different ones handle that differently). @askvortsov's extension does exactly what you're asking with the only appreciable difference being in the exact appearance of emojis, and of course it cannot show you both light and dark theme. So it's not quite full WYSIWYG, but it's extremely close and further along that end compared with most Rich-Text Editors.

What I mentioned is most certainly relevant because it relates to how pasted-in text is handled. MyBB's for examples keeps formatting colour of the source, and that's bad if you have both a light and dark theme because it leads to frequent problems - and most members using Rich Text Editors do not instinctively understand how to remove the formatting when they paste text. Fonts are another annoyance as well - you don't necessarily want pasted-in text to follow the source font, and thankfully with Flarum you can't native select other fonts at all which I think is good.

I suggest you test out the extension yourself if you haven't already.

Anyway your point was that the decision to leave it out of the Flarum Core will hurt adaptation of the forum software. Respectfully I disagree with you on that. Flarum is incredibly popular already, and from what I can tell most people don't bother with the Rich-Text editor. Some people don't want to let their users have too much ease of access to control the text formatting, and prefer discussions to flow organically with standard text. Flarum is a different type of forum software to others, what some see as its drawbacks others see as an opportunity.

TB54

Valeyard and that's bad if you have both a light and dark theme because it leads to frequent problems

I don't really understand this, if it's the only reason to not put colors in the composer: it seems to me that it would just needs a CSS line in dark mode, asking to invert the luminosity of the span text with color in messages, and to keep the hue as it is (and maybe tame it a little for it to not appear too flashy).

Something like that (not sure of the values, this should be checked with several colors):

.Post-body span[style*="color"] {
          filter: invert(100%) hue-rotate(180deg) brightness(80%);
}

Besides, the color tool could be proposed only as an option if it's still a problem for some.

Valeyard

And what are you going to do about:

[color][url=...][img]someimage.jpeg[/img]...?

TB54

Valeyard Oh ok, i just understood! Well, easy, you invert again for img:

.Post-body span[style*="color"] {
          filter: invert(100%) hue-rotate(180deg) brightness(80%);
}
.Post-body span[style*="color"] img {
          filter: invert(100%) hue-rotate(180deg) brightness(120%);
}

Here is the BBcode example to do a test (with a dark red as color):


[color=#800000][url=https://www.google.com]
[img]https://discuss.flarum.org/assets/logo-9yg6hfqg.png[/img]
Link-text[/url]
, No-link-text[/color]

Here is the light mode result:

Here is the dark mode result with above CSS:

The values should be tested more precisely that said, as the result color for red is a little dull.

TB54

I don't understand: in your example, what would be different in the final code? There would still be a span around all with a color assigned, no?

GoodTimes

Hello everyone, I believe the discussion may have veered off in the wrong direction.

It's important to note that WYSIWYG editors don't necessarily need to support all the complex features of HTML5. Rather, their purpose is to provide a live preview of the content as it's being edited. In fact, a simplistic editor like the one currently available in Flarum (but with WYSIWYG) could be more than enough for 99.9% of forums, featuring only basic functionalities such as bold/italic/strikethrough text, lists, links, etc.

However, if someone requires more advanced features that are difficult to support for both dark and light themes, such as text colors, they can always develop a plugin for the editor.

I don't see any valid reason why a simple WYSIWYG editor lacking advanced features like text recoloring cannot exist in Flarum's core. With the ability to add complex features through extensions.

SychO

GoodTimes Core is meant to be simple and lean, a foundation that allows customization ad enhancement through extensions. Have you tried https://discuss.flarum.org/d/26455-wysiwyg-rich-text-editor ?

GoodTimes

SychO Core is meant to be simple and lean

Core's implementation of WYSIWYG could also (and should) be simple and lean. There is nothing wrong with that.

SychO Have you tried https://discuss.flarum.org/d/26455-wysiwyg-rich-text-editor

Yes, I've tried that, but:

It's buggy.
It's overcomplicated, and thus, it's too big.
It's an extension, so its future is uncertain since it is maintained by just one person. It receives a lot less attention, testing, and bug reports from the community than core features. Having fewer users leads to less quality and long term stability.
People (community) are more willing to invest their time, feedback, testing, and support into core features than extensions, as it provides greater assurance of the future stability of that functionality.

SychO

GoodTimes Unfortunately, core is also only maintained by very few individuals, so more features come at a cost. Rather then have a lean WYSIWYG into core, it would be better to have a lean WYSIWYG extension.

luceos Flarum is about keeping the number of bundled extensions and core as lean as possible. We don't have many developers, we don't have much capacity, so the capacity we do have has to be used efficiently and effectively.