So I’m still working on evaluating whether I can use Discourse as an element of our project (building a collaboration network for cancer researchers and patients). So far it has been going well, lots of things that we thought were going to be problems turned out not to be.
However, one persistent sticking point is the markdown editor. Our users aren’t going to be sophisticated, stack-overflow type people, and things like image tags and embedded markup are going to really confuse them.
I was wondering if there were plans on the roadmap to provide a full WYSIWYG editing experience, similar to what is offered by TinyMCE, CKEditor, Summernote, Froala and other editors that use content-editable. I realize of course that you wouldn’t be able to use those components directly since that would likely break all of your plugins; it will probably have to be something custom written. That’s a lot of work, but at least there’s an existence proof that it’s possible.
It also seems to me that this is something that fits in with your mission statement, “civilized discussion” (which I love BTW - I’ve been thinking about ways to improve the national discourse for over a decade now). I would think that you would want to bring the benefits of polite conversation to all users, not just the technically-minded ones.