I have some exprence in taking notes of math in the Editor: StackEdit, while the discouse editor (what’s her name?) is my first forum editor that support markdown and mathjax at the same time with perfect preview, it seems that there are still have some space to make it more perfect, compare with StackEdit:
a table of content guide of a rather length topic: in stackedit, we can just put a shortcode called [toc] to make a table of content with links
the particial render of mathjax is also quire important: in stackedit, it can render a part of the doc which make the writter take the real advantage of WYSIWYG.
auto-complete: for example, when we write a list, press enter will auto add an item…
(this maybe a bug) It seems that the mathjax is not able to render equation with labels, for example:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:1}
$\text{math is amazing}$
\end{equation}
then a second render will broken the equation in preview, I think this can be solved by remove the label in equation and configure mathjax with autonumber: AMS, then the \eqref
command is redefined to be link to the equation directly.
save my post in google doc: Some important thing sholud be save some where we can find it easily…
support markdown extensions: I like to use table and footnote(as my bibliography) in the post
This is just a short list of things which I think will make discourse more perfect, add more if you got an idea…
I would really love to see Ckeditor being integrated into Discourse, and it is free since it discourse is an open source product. CKeditor has many nice features, tools and addons that works really great. And it uses Widgets as well http://ckeditor.com/demo#widgets
My school currently uses CKeditor as the main WYSIWYG editor for our Sakai instance. CKeditor is an insanely powerful text-editor, but IMHO it might be TOO powerful and feature-rich for what Discourse needs/is.
They DO have a light version so that may be a good version to start basing work on. It’s pretty much a core editor supplemented by tons of different plugins.
@codinghorror said that he looks at making Discourse a very popular forum software.
One of the first things which appeals to users is the way they can create a topic and the tools within the editor. CKEditor is feature rich and unique to use and would make Discourse works better when creating topics.
Yea, I just had to do an update to the new version of CKeditor and it’s amazing what it can do now with plugins (I’m looking at you MathJax).
You do have a point there. It would be great if someone could make the opening posts VERY informative without need for lots of extraneous links and tools.
You can embed almost anything and put in a lot of stuff.
I’ll see if I can talk to him about one day possibly using it.
I would be interested in someone trying out creating a plugin for something like https://github.com/guardian/scribe , that said the concept of markdown is baked quite deep into Discourse and HTML to markdown engines are all fairly rough.
I don’t see much room moving to StackEdit as we own our editor and markdown pipeline and are constantly adding the features we need to it. We have the architecture to allow for various extensions that stack edit has.
I find CKEditor and the rest of the bohemouth do everything wyswig editors a pretty big problem, but sure people can create plugins.
Transitioning in and out of non-markdown editor plugins will be a massive pain though.
I don’t quite understand all this… but may be the transitioning would be easy if the Ckeditor is converted to using bbcode?
I think that is what Vbulletin did with the CKEditor, they code it to use bbcode or something like that, they didn’t just install the editor and use it out of the box. I think they said it took them 2 month to convert the editor’s tools and functions to bbcode.
I think many knows that : ) but those who are used to IPB, or Vbulletin’s functions and features which are basically dominating the forum market, many of them might not look into Discourse if it isn’t competing at the same level or better and i think that is Discourse’s goal to become the most popular forum platform.
So wait, you’re suggesting that Discourse take 2 months to overhaul an existing project? Just so that people have more choice of text editor?.. (It may take less time, because Markdown takes HTML, but – WYSIWYG editors unanimously produce ugly HTML, and it will be tough for any communities to transition to any other forum software, past, present, or future, if the posts are in HTML.)
As @sam said, “people can create plugins.” From looking at the code, I can vouch that it will be possible to completely overhaul the editor in a plugin.
Maybe a better route would be to work towards getting those extensions that exist for other editors built for Discourse.
This was based on what VBulletin staff said but remember VB admin system is much more feature rich and complicated than Discourse, so that is why it took them 2 month to convert the editor into bbcode and add the ability to add custom bbcode to the editor through the admin system and so on - a much more complicated approach that also works with user group permission.
I personally would love to see the CKEditor being integrated well with Discourse. One of the essential elements of sharing is how you are going to create topics and having the needed tools that makes creating topics a fun and deep experience.
I’m agreed. I need a WYSIWYG editor, users want to copy and paste and are too lazy and need many time to format it markdown or BBCODE.
I vote [SCEditor][1]
Actually the existing edit field is perfectly fine, but it looks like you’re all trying to solve a user preference matter on a site-wide basis. The solution is not to force your preferred editor on every user of the site you’re running (let alone every site running a Discourse instance), the solution is for users to be able to edit any text field with the editor of their choice.
Now, since Discourse uses a HTML textarea field and not a contenteditable element, this is actually possible. The Firefox extension Its All Text provides exactly that function. In fact, I’m writing this reply in GNU Emacs as a result of that. Now I’m willing to bet that you cannot find a javascript text editor/plugin which can truly equal the feature set of Emacs. Not even Code Mirror or Ymacs try to make that claim. So all you really need to do is support editing through an interface which It’s All Text can handle.
Ah, I hear you say, but what if I want to use Chrome? Well, I don’t use it so I can’t verify this personally, but apparently this Chrome extension will do the job. It looks like it takes a little more to configure, but otherwise should be similar.
And what of Internet Explorer? Well, really you should probably stop that, but if you must … there’s this.
Oh, if Emacs ain’t your thing, that’s fine. You can run pretty much any text editor you like through these extensions. Editors that run inside a terminal may require a little shell scripting trickery, but otherwise you can do what you like.
I’m noticing various simple editor controls missing (font, size (besides h1/h2), font color, alignment, float a block/image left/right, removing formatting, etc. Plus lots of problems with undo (in particular not undoing!).
I know alot of these can be addressed by using markdown or html, but I don’t expect my users to learn those. They expect simple editor controls.
I see this as a major problem. The creation of quality attractive content is the first step!
One thing I’m really missing from the StackEdit environment is the list editing. Pressing enter inside a list will insert a new item, and indentation is handled very nicely using tab and shift-tab.
