February 19, 2008 9:56am
Rick Cockrum writes about wysiwyg editors for Habari, noting that Habari's editor uses raw HTML by default. That might be fine for techie geeks, but is unlikely to go far in the long run.
The first option you have is to use an alternative HTML-izible markup, and there are plugins available for Textile and Markdown (actually two for Markdown, here and here, though I really wish they could merge into one version). That may still be too geeky for most.
The second alternative is to use one of the recently released WYSIWYG plugins, of which there are three. First, the TinyMCE plugin, which I've released myself, though at some point I'll probably donate it to the community. Second, the NicEdit plugin, started by Christian Mohn. Third, jwysiwig. Both NicEdit and jwysiwig are now in the Habari community repository and owned by the Habari community. However, I've done significant coding on all three of these, so if you have any comments or feature requests, please let me know.
So, back to Rick's post. He accurately points out some shortcomings of each of the editors, and in a comment I added some more, which I'll briefly recap. None of the plugins are very configurable. Only TinyMCE is resizable. jwysiwig doesn't work with the media silos (a huge sin, because I think the media silos are a killer feature). Once Habari 0.4 has been released (soon, soon, I hope) I'll try to fix all of these issues.
Additionally, TinyMCE is not tiny, but there isn't much I can do about that.
Actually, the biggest driver for me doing any work on them at all would be for people to let me know that they're using them.
February 20th, 2008 at 3:20pm
Right now I'm leaning toward NicEdit because of it's size, and because it does work with the media silos. Not that I use them, but you're right about them being a killer feature.
Things I would like to see -
1. The html view to either align properly with the wysiwyg view. I don't know if you can help this or not.
2. A choice between using styles or html tags for styling. A way to set the font and font size in the editor that doesn't affect the font and font size in the published post.
3. The cursor disappears, I can't remember whether in the wysiwyg view or html view - the latter I think. Again, I don't know if this is something you can do anything about.
I do appreciate the work you've done on these. I'm geek enough I don't mind using pure html, but most people who blog would rather have their editor work like any word processor.
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:29am
The first markdown plugin you link to is my updated version of drunkenmonkey's. He doesn't apply markdown to the feed in his, and the title is unescaped, so creates issues with valid html being outputted.
I keep meaning to email him the patch to update his, but I never seem to have gotten around to it.
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:45pm
Rick, thanks for the feedback. I think you're right that there's not much I can do about the editor specific stuff, but I'll certainly have a look.
Caius, definitely great changes; please patch! I'm just loathe to start the duplication of plugins so early in Habari's life.
April 13th, 2008 at 1:16am
I must be doing something wrong because when I activate the NicEdit, it ask me to configure... when I click on configure there is nothing to configure...
secondly, when I type, nothing in the post area (of text) is saved... it simply vanishes when I click save..
Any help in this matter is greatly appreciated.
April 13th, 2008 at 5:08am
There's nothing to configure in the NicEdit plugin yet, I'm waiting for someone to tell me what they want to configure :)
For the second part, I've sent you an email.