Discourse Basic Editor

Hi, I am working on a plugin at the moment that replaces the standard editor with a wysiwg editor. I think its easier for beginner users like myself and others. Here is a short video on how it works so far and what my plans are:

I think it will be finished in the next few months ( depending on my motivation :smiley: ) I would be interested if others are interested in using this as well.
Thaaaanks :slightly_smiling_face:
PS: after this is done I will rewrite all the other plugins I did so far to be based on this editor. There are some features I plan that will enable other plugins to use this plugin as a kind of api to replace the composer and the post cooking process with something custom. For a project I am working on this already works quite well. The issue is that right now some plugins that modify the composer are mutually exclusive. And if both are activated there will be trouble. I think this plugin can help resolve this issue. Here is the repo: GitHub - spirobel/discourse-basic-editor: An attempt to make discourse more user friendly.

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Well done! An incredible initiative and we are already testing it in our discourse composition!
Will be glad to help with Russian translation and bug reports.

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Pretty cool initiative!

I see you went with CKEditor. Did you test any others?

For example https://trix-editor.org/ is the one incorporated in Rails 6, the most popular https://www.slatejs.org/examples/richtext, or the minimalist pell - jaredreich.com.

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The way the composer should be, bloody brilliant! I have some nit-picky feedback but that can wait since you’re just in the beginning stages.

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hahahahahahhaha
:laughing:

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Does this works with the latest build? 2.6 BETA

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Neat idea! Even on my forum, not everyone is comfortable with using the Markdown Editor directly.
The beginners (non-tech guys and elderly ones) probably feel the MD syntax alienish, and sometimes mess up their post formatting. (IDK how tho)

It would be great if the plugin eventually becomes an official plugin. :slight_smile:
Or even part of Discourse as a setting which the admin can enable for WYSIWYG editor.

Will try it out and post my feedback!

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FYI the upload seems to be broken with the latest build, I’m getting this error:

image

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I guess its fixed now. btw… if someone does not have a test instance but wants to take a look:


you can create an account there and make test posts :smiley:
Its my dev instance so it might break sometimes or I will install other things but at the moment the basic editor is installed there.
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Haven’t installed yet but a cool piece of work just by the sound of it. I’ll try this soon :slight_smile:

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Great composer. Can you add color for text?

I took it for a test drive. Impressive.

Liked some of the features such as entering a table or adding a formula.
The cat icon had me confused until I clicked it.

:+1:

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haha nice :cat2: sadly it will disappear once I switched over to html only posts.
@Cam_Logical I will do this once I switched over to html. maybe not color, but probably alignment.

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Would you consider an option for touchscreen users in the design?

The context menus for selection on touchscreens are displayed ABOVE the selection & obscure the button bar when the selection is in the top couple lines of the text box.

This means short messages never gain access to the button bar functionalities.

Could there be an option to have the formatting buttons at the BOTTOM of the text box?

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Once oneboxing and the other Discourse related things are implemented we will for sure switch to this true WYSIWYG composer based on CKEDITOR as we used the same one our current website. Great work so far.

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Do the oneboxes not work at all? What happens when you post a link on the first line of the post?

I think they should work with this one too. I’ll post my findings once I try this.

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Maybe, not tested and there was no update from the OP… but there is also mentioning and what else I don’t know that needs to be implemented…

Hollow from picture. What do you use.

image

Oneboxing works fine on my end with this.

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Everything works like it would work with the normal editor. The UX is just not perfect at the moment.(if you want you can click on “show preview” and just do this like you are used to) But my assumption is that these features are not that relevant for beginner users anyway, so my urgency to work on this is not super high. The discourse specific additions to markdown (quotes of specific posts, mentions, oneboxes) will not be displayed in the wysiwg part.(but they are still visible in the preview and you can also switch back and forth to the advanced editor. just look at my video) My plan is to add a small button to every link so users can select to make them a onebox. All of this will be done by switching to html only posts. the conversion to and from markdown is just too much of a hassle. It wont be too hard to implement all of this. I read the relevant code in the discourse code base already. But my personal project ( a mandarin, english, german dictionary based on discourse) is higher on my priority list. Please keep in mind that I dont get paid to do any of this.

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