WYSIWYG Editor Questions

[Shotster]

I'm just wondering...

Is the WYSIWYG editor considered finished, or will it be further enhanced prior to the final release of version 2.0? I ask because the WYSIWYG editor is one of the reasons I decided to use SMF for my site, but there seems to be a lot of incomplete functionality. Tables, quotes, and code blocks aren't rendered in the WYSIWYG editor.

This also raises the question of why the SM folks decided to reinvent the wheel instead of using one of the already existing WYSIWYG editors out there. For instance, CKEditor (formerly FCKEditor) and the YUI (Yahoo user interface) editor seem to be quite capable and have gotten favorable reviews.

Just curious where things are headed with respect to the editor, as it's key for the demographic I'm targeting with my site.

Thanks,

-Steve

[H]

This also raises the question of why the SM folks decided to reinvent the wheel instead of using one of the already existing WYSIWYG editors out there. For instance, CKEditor (formerly FCKEditor) and the YUI (Yahoo user interface) editor seem to be quite capable and have gotten favorable reviews.

I don't believe any of these support bbcode which is what SMF and other forum software use.

Is the WYSIWYG editor considered finished, or will it be further enhanced prior to the final release of version 2.0? I ask because the WYSIWYG editor is one of the reasons I decided to use SMF for my site, but there seems to be a lot of incomplete functionality. Tables, quotes, and code blocks aren't rendered in the WYSIWYG editor.

I'm not sure if these are broken or planned for a future release but I'd be surprised if we didn't make further improvements to the WYSIWYG editor

[Shotster]

I don't believe any of these support bbcode which is what SMF and other forum software use.

To my knowledge, so-called WYSIWYG or "rich" editors simply utilize an iframe containing a regular old (albeit editable) HTML document. The HTML is then converted (via RegEx or whatever) to BBCode and vice versa.

YUI and CKEditor both blow the SMF editor out of the water in terms of functionality and UI. It's not clear to me why they would choose to reinvent the wheel.

-Steve

[H]

You want an editor which doesn't make too much additional html that is going to make it hard to convert to bbcode without changing the layout considerably.

There is also the issue of licensing in many third-party editors (although I didn't actually look at the licenses of those you linked to)

[Shotster]

You want an editor which doesn't make too much additional html that is going to make it hard to convert to bbcode without changing the layout considerably.

I don't understand where you're coming from. The editor makes as much mark-up as you allow with the formatting buttons/options you provide. Plus, you have complete control over which HTML tags you want to support/convert.

(although I didn't actually look at the licenses of those you linked to)

Uhhh well, perhaps it's worth looking into. CKEditor is available as a plugin for WordPress (and I can attest that it works great). YUI is also utilized in other open source packages.

-Steve

[butchs]

I turned it off at my forum because it did not accept carriage returns with Safari 4.

[Shotster]

I turned it off at my forum because it did not accept carriage returns with Safari 4.

Precisely my point. This has all been thoroughly thought out and tested with other editors out there. I'm not extremely familiar with the SMF internals, but I don't see why one couldn't "plug in" one of the existing editors and run the resulting HTML through a bbcode converter routine of some sort. Sure, that may be an oversimplification, but it's got to be easier than creating your own editor from scratch. In fact, one might be able to create a SMF mod utilizing one of the other editors in relatively short order.

-Steve

[JBlaze]

Hello Shotster, do you still need more information regarding WYSIWIG in SMF?

[Shotster]

Hello Shotster, do you still need more information regarding WYSIWIG in SMF?

I guess the answer I received from H is as close as I'm going to get.

-Steve

[H]

A lot of the editors, despite being open source have licenses that aren't compatible with ours

As far as I'm aware none of the editors provide proper bbcode support. Each forum software has slight differences in the bbcode formatting that they use. While there is always the option of extending these it was my understanding that some of the problems with ours has been with the html>bbcode conversion itself so these problems would still exist if we had to adapt an existing solution.
They would also have to be modified greatly to fit with our file structure, translation system etc

If this is possible with only a very small amount of work, I'd be interesting to see someone take one of the available editors and make a mod for it

[karlbenson]

Hopefully SMF has made it so that it is possible to use a third party editor with SMF.
(I hope to see some mods for it at some point).

However for security reasons SMF won't ship with a third party editor. (Even the most popular ones have had recent security issues)

It is accepted that there are issues and bugs with the current wysiwyg editor.
Although it is INTENTIONAL that some bbcodes will not be converted as it will make editing difficult.
eg Tables, code, quote are among the main ones.