• Dev

  • wysiwyg editor (again)

sledov

I gotta say. Ive owned vbulletin forums, xenforo forums, even own a discourse forum now. I have never seen anything as bare bones as this right now. You are completely correct that the average user needs an editor. I wouldnt even consider donating or paying for a forum that doesnt have one.

I think the biggest problems in these "new" forums is developers make them with only developers in mind and what they like. not what the average user or public wants. You want a successful software? Develop it for the users not developers.

    I personally rarely use the editors on forums like phpBB, once you know the basic image, list and font tags of BBCode or Markdown you're pretty good to go.

    I also understand the need for some users to have a fully WYSIWIG experience. If somebody needs a better extension than the existing MDE extension for that I'd happily work on it as a paid job ?

    3 months later

    Bump, flarum requires some sort of optional editor that at least allows Bold Italic and Strikethrough, also quotation and headers would another good addition, any idea if or when this could be implemented? I'd write the code myself but I'm fairly new to all this, still learning the basics.

      luceos check the squill editor extension

      I guess you mean the Quill Editor. There is a discussion about this editor by @sledov himself including a test forum, but this test forum also exhibits the flaws of this extension:

      1. The stored content of the posts is not markdown anymore, so after discontinuing the use of this extension, the whole forum is rendered rubbish.
      2. You can't use flarums existing functionalities anymore to quote someone or to reference other posts with the nice preview we have here, nor can you see who answered to your post.
      3. Other extensions like the Emoji Picker won't work anymore.

      For these reasons, the Quill Editor is no option for me. I'm still searching for myself.

          Blodeuwedd Yes, and I know they have it in mind for the future (it may not be spelled out on the roadmap but it's been on the planned features list for ages and it's unlikely to just vanish). But Flarum embraces its third party extensions just as much as first party, you shouldn't need to wait for a native extension.

              jordanjay29 To a point yes, I can see the concern with third party extensions, especially for something most forums have as a built in feature. There is always the concern of the extension not getting updated and not working with future versions, whereas built in features or extensions don't carry those same concerns.

                  8 days later

                  Martin There is always the concern of the extension not getting updated and not working with future versions, whereas built in features or extensions don't carry those same concerns.

                  To the contrary.

                  Let's assume, a team of core developers has limited ressources in terms of time dedicated to a project. Let's have a look at the two models of programming at hand:

                  A) The core developers decide for a set of functionalities they deem neccessary and include them in the core software. To save some time, they decide not to provide an extension mechanism.

                  B) The core developers concentrate at the absolute bare bones, leaving out private messages, an editor, yes even sub forums, but at the same time providing a powerful extension mechanism for everyone interested to jump in and add what they miss.

                  Model B) doesn't guarantee all the features, that the developers might think of, but at any time they are free to step in and provide those extensions themselves. Many extensions however will be provided by others already, so that the developers can use the saved time to advance with the core.

                  Admitted, the extension mechanism itself needs to be programmed, but looking at the architecture of flarum, you can see that even the core uses several external packages, so that a mechanism to incorporate external sources is already baked into the software. So why not use it for extension programming?

                  The whole project has better chances to proceed faster and be successful with model B than with model A.

                    Pollux The stored content of the posts is not markdown anymore, so after discontinuing the use of this extension, the whole forum is rendered rubbish.

                    I am not trying to convince you to use the extension. I don't think it is ready for production use, but I hope it is still interesting as an example.

                    Just a couple of comments.

                    Content of a post is always stored as xml, not markdown. It is core flarum-ext-markdown extension that renders it. Similarly there is flarum-ext-bbcode extension that renders bbcode. I just didn't want to make a separate flarum-ext-html extension, but the functionality is inside of quill extension. It can be pulled out and used without the quill. If you like to edit html tags by hand that is.

                    Pollux For these reasons, the Quill Editor is no option for me. I'm still searching for myself.

                    There is nothing reasonably usable at the moment.

                    Flarum is primarily interesting for developers. Developers are geeks and prefer to use markdown. Since it has been this way from the day one, extensions that are embedding something into the editing area, also assume that it is markdown. So, it will take a lot of dedication to bring html editing on the same level as markdown editing.

                          sledov I don't think it is ready for production use, but I hope it is still interesting as an example.

                          This it surely is. I just wanted to express some caveat to those, who were eager to follow this route without knowing the drawbacks.

                          sledov Content of a post is always stored as xml, not markdown. It is core flarum-ext-markdown extension that renders it.

                          That's true, my fault.

                          If I deactivate the Markdown extension, my post are still readable, they just miss the text formatting like bold, italic, code etc. What will happen, if you deactivate the Quill extension after people have written posts using it? Will they just miss the formatting? My impression was, that it's far worse, bordering to unreadable.

                              You will come here and say: "How come such a simple feature as rendering html content is not available as a standard feature or at least as a core module?".

                              Or may be you will find a way to enable it yourself, because it is not too difficult.

                              a year later

                              The default editor is certainly a dealbreaker for me, coming from the PhpBB world where the BBCode editor is at least matured and understandable, and there are buttons to kind of guide you along the learning curve of that.

                              I understand that a markdown editor is easy to implement and well understood by web developers or users of stack overflow, but we can't expect average joe to learn it; instead he'll just write short posts and create facebook-quality content all day.

                              Something like quill should really be baked into this cake since we're in beta and don't have legacy cruft to support yet; rather than being an extension that will break and require fixing as Flarum evolves.

                              Creating high quality, well formatted content should be as easy and user friendly as using Microsoft Word in 1995.