Rich Text Formatting (WYSIWYG)

[s1clarke (Sam)]

Hi all,

The users of my Discourse community are sports teachers who are not very technical, therefore the enforced use of markdown in the editor has created some formatting problems in posts.

Ideally, we could enable a rich text WYSIWYG editor to make posting as simple and familiar as possible. Are there any ways to enable this or, if not, plans for inclusion on the roadmap?

Cheers

[Stephen]

Hey Sam,

There are a few topics already which discuss this. The short version is that Markdown is intrinsic to Discourse, and no WYSIWYG options are planned (AFAIK)

Who would prefer a standard wysiwyg to markdown?

I just saw an interview with Michael Pryor of trello: At one point he says: We added markdown in Trello which in retrospect, was a mistake because it’s a developer centric feature in a non developer focused product. We overcame it by adding guidance on how to use markdown within the app, but users sometimes still get confused. I’m curious to know what the feeling out there is about the use of markdown in Discourse. Am I the only one who thinks discourse would appeal to many more people i…

WYSIWYG Plugin (again)

Continuing the discussion from Who would prefer a standard wysiwyg to markdown?: I checked with the founders and they are ok with us restarting this thread with a view to discussing the development of a plugin to deliver some form of WYSIWYG post editing in Discourse. Bearing in mind @sam’s & @codinghorror’s previous comments that the core team would not consider undertaking such development for the foreseeable future, what remains is the opportunity for the rest of us to get together and pr…

If using markdown and not having a WYSIWYG is a complete dealbreaker, then you may be better off looking for a different product all together.

If you need more detail as to why, this may help explain the challenge presented:

Rethinking the Composer - lowering the bar

It is extremely difficult, as the code makes deep assumptions about the Markdown pipeline throughout. I would estimate a budget of around $100,000 - $120,000 USD to make the WYSIWYG change and 1 year of full time developer work. (Or two full time devs for 6 months). If you would like to fund it, contact us directly. Another way to look at it — this is like saying I prefer MySQL, can’t you guys just switch your database from Postgres to MySQL?