WYSIWYG Editor!

[.Joel]

Hi,

I did a search and know this has been mentioned before, but I am adding my voice to it.  We have selected to go with SMF, but if there is not going to be a WYSIWYG editor in the future (i'm not talking next week), then SMF will go the way of the dodos in years to come.

Quite basically scripts are becoming more interactive, ajax is being implemented etc.  We have great use of this on our gallery, and have selected to use SMF as our forum software.  I did a test conversion from our phpBB board which we have been running for about 3 yrs.

I can safely say however if there are no future plans for WYSIWYG editor then i'll be jumping ship earlier then expected.

So please, plan to include this in the future, as it is what the community members want.  I'm not talking the uber-geek admins on here, i'm talking the members that signup to the sites we implement this software on.  Give me generic statements like "security, page-load, bandwidth" bla bla bla till the sun burns out, at the end of the day it is where the future is.  You can code for 10 years, if it isn't where the demand is people aren't interested.

The future is  changing, we are progressing, WYSIWYG editor is part of that future whether developers want to realize this or not.  It is becoming part of the mobile / online desktop.

Regards,

Joel

[vbgamer45]

There are plans for it in the version after SMF 1.1.

You can probably find a way to intergrate a WYSIWYG editor that exists right now into SMF.

[.Joel]

There are plans for it in the version after SMF 1.1.

You can probably find a way to intergrate a WYSIWYG editor that exists right now into SMF.

Sweet to hear.  As you can see from my post I'm not trying to start a storm, just simply pointing out in the future we will need it as the demand grows.

As long as there is some roadmap to it in the future then that's awsome.  At the moment we are more then pleased with SMF compared to phpBB, and honestly this site has cost me an arm and a leg to setup so avoiding vb or ipb.

Regards,

Joel

[SleePy]

From what I know the problem with a wysiwyg editor is that it doesn't understand bbcode...
And having allow html isn't a smart thing to do as hackers love being able to type html onto your site 
So when bbcode is able to be handled by wysiwyg correctly then it is all good...

This could possibly be done by having javascript temporally change it so it displays correctly and then when they click post change it back to bbcode...

[Jacen]

If this is being planned, it also needs a site-wide "off" switch

[Ben_S]

If this is being planned, it also needs a site-wide "off" switch

I don't think you need to worry there

[Daniel15]

We have selected to go with SMF, but if there is not going to be a WYSIWYG editor in the future (i'm not talking next week), then SMF will go the way of the dodos in years to come.
.......
I can safely say however if there are no future plans for WYSIWYG editor then i'll be jumping ship earlier then expected

Well, what forum system would you move to? I don't know of any forum that has a WYSIWYG editor (apart from Microsoft's MSDN forums, but I've flamed them in the past due to its incompatibility with a lot of browsers. Besides, they use HTML rather than BBCode!). A BBCode WYSIWYG editor would need to be written from scratch, as basically all the current WYSIWYG editors (TinyMCE, FCKEditor, etc.) use HTML rather than BBcode...

I think that a WYSIWYG editor should be integrated into the browser, but maybe that's just me?

[bloc]

VB do use bbcode, but they translate the html back and forth between editor and database. Which is the best way to go imho. Storing it as bbcode allows it to work whether you can see the ditor or not.

Not all browsers can show the editor, and its important to not rule them out.

[Jacen]

I thinmk IPB 2 has it as well, in a similar fashion to vB

[zwaldowski]

Well, SMF [and other board software] use BBCode to filter into HTML.

All we have to do is strike up a partnership with a good WYSIWYG Editor, make it secure, and use the default BBCodes in it, striking out all the need for a BBCode filter at all.

Or, use BBCode in the editor and, like vB, use some AJAX to filter that bbcode into HTML.  I bet we can even one-up vB, and make it show quotes and the like as well.

[Jacen]

Well, SMF [and other board software] use BBCode to filter into HTML.

All we have to do is strike up a partnership with a good WYSIWYG Editor, make it secure, and use the default BBCodes in it, striking out all the need for a BBCode filter at all.

Or, use BBCode in the editor and, like vB, use some AJAX to filter that bbcode into HTML.  I bet we can even one-up vB, and make it show quotes and the like as well.

Nothing stopping you from making a mod

[bloc]

I too have looked at many editors and there are some leeway for doing conversions-on-the-spot in some of them..but the javascript for it goes over my head lol. A built-in routine in Post.php to translate forth and back should be possible though. But still a major task by any measure.

[Grudge]

As discussed here there are plans for WYSWIYG in the version of SMF after 1.1 - but this is quite some way off. We can't ship SMF with existing editors due to licensing so we've coded it from scratch. It's currently basic but functional - doing bold, underline, color, fonts, URL, images etc - works with IE and Firefox currently and is adjustable on a user basis as well as a forum wide "disable" setting. For those interested in the fine detail it works by editing the HTML parsed BBC - and when you save the post a SMF source function converts HTML back to BBC (Was one hell of a function to write!). This is considerably better and more sensible than writing a javascript BBC parsar.

This is all the info you're going to get until the next version of SMF makes it to beta

[Daniel15]

works with IE and Firefox

Please make sure it works in Opera as well

[Grudge]

Will try daniel although its unlikely to work on old versions as opera has awful support for design mode until now...

Related the editor does of course degrade gracefully without browser support

[Daniel15]

Will try daniel although its unlikely to work on old versions as opera has awful support for design mode until now...

Yeah, I meant Opera 9 support... Older versions don't support it.
FCKEditor still doesn't have support for Opera, whereas TinyMCE supported it the day it came out (which is why I now like TinyMCE better )

Related the editor does of course degrade gracefully without browser support

Yeah, I would have expected that. That means I can still post replies using Lynx (hehe, I was bored, so I SSH'ed into my server and posted this post using Lynx

[Krysia]

Ugh!

Please don't go the way of WYSIWYG editors! They're awful, and they're sluggish, and all-around general pain in the ass to use.

(I already ranted in the poll similar to this thread, so we won't go there again because I'm out of medicine. LOL.)

I'd never allow a poster on one of my forums to use HTML to post anyway. BBC only. There are some things that are better left simple, IMO.

[Grudge]

Krysia,

Please don't misunderstand what we are implenting. This is not a free reign on HTML nor does it provide any additional functionality that currently in SMF (aside being able to see the formatting of your post "live"). When the user submits their "WYSIWYG" post it is converted into BBC before it is stored in the database. Any HTML in their post they submit which cannot be converted into BBC will simply be lost. This means in the off chance that they could get javascript into the WYSIWYG editor it would absolutely be impossible to get into their stored post so poses no security risk at all.

I cannot emphasise enough that security is absolutely at the core of everything we do with SMF - we would *never* implement anything that compromised security in the slightest. As said before assuming WYSIWYG is an option in the next version of SMF it will be possible to disable by both admins and users and is nothing more than a pretty interface to the user - it does not change the core way SMF treats data.

[Jacen]

To me, the issue isn't security. it's server and browser load.

The other day I was trying toedit a page on my MKPortal, but had many troubles with it... in the end I force disabled javascript and did it the old fashioned way. Faster and more convenient.

[Krysia]

This is not a free reign on HTML nor does it provide any additional functionality that currently in SMF (aside being able to see the formatting of your post "live"). When the user submits their "WYSIWYG" post it is converted into BBC before it is stored in the database.

As said before assuming WYSIWYG is an option in the next version of SMF it will be possible to disable by both admins and users and is nothing more than a pretty interface to the user - it does not change the core way SMF treats data.

Phew! Well, that's good to know. Hopefully if it's ever implemented (ugh!), there'll be a checkbox option to use or not use it. I still hate it. It's still slower than sludge; I haven't forgotten the trouble it caused me when I was on dialup.