Simpler markdown editor?

Hypothetical and yes I know, potentially volatile subject but my old hobby horse - the markdown editor and non-technical users. I don’t want to go over old ground but this continues to be a bit of a blocker for adoption of Discourse in our mainly over 50 CAMRA forum - it’s not going away :frowning:

I’ve just used the Fasthosts beta community recently and thought to myself “this is a nice little editor, simple and effective”. I noticed a little menu box bottom left which opens up the usual limited editing options like bold, italic etc.

But there is an advanced button on there which to my surprise reveals that this community is based upon markdown. I can’t comment how effective switching between the two is but would it be feasible for something similar in Discourse?

I see this as a win-win situation. The markdown detractors are happy as they have a nice simple editor for 99% of the time and the technical camp are happy because it’s still markdown under the hood.

Could you share some screenshots (better yet, screengrabs) of the editor UX you’re talking about? Not many people are gonna bother signing up to that website just to have a look at some buttons :wink:

2개의 좋아요

Sure - this is new comment box when you open up an existing topic:

I entered the bold text using the Ctrl-B keyboard shortcut. Clicking the only visible menu icon slides in a limited text editing toolbar:

And advanced mode switches to markdown:

Editing help opens another page describing markdown:

Not sure that link will work so here’s a PDF print of the page:

Advanced Editing Help.pdf (84.6 KB)

I entered some text that gets interpreted as markdown and it prefixed it correctly. For example, people often put #1 at the start of a line which turns it into a header. In this editor, #1 worked as expected and when I switched to advanced/markdown it had been prefixed as \#1

I asked on the community if the moderators knew which system it was and they said Oracle. Zero knowledge of Oracle these days but maybe it’s Lithium?

https://www.lithium.com/pages/idc-marketscape-worldwide-online-communities-2016-vendor-assessment?source=Google%20AdWords&source2=Google%20AdWords&cc=GS-gaw&gclid=Cj0KEQiAw_DEBRChnYiQ_562gsEBEiQA4Lcsss3VWwF6CINK5HtcGbujSCe61fVhVobfz4OYWSl8J24aAs1U8P8HAQ

6개의 좋아요

Interesting enough, I had the same request in my newly transferred community just the other day - mainly because our old solution had an rich text editor.

2개의 좋아요

@Rob_Nicholson님의 의견에 전적으로 동의합니다. 더 단순한 뷰어를 사용하되, 내부적으로는 마크다운을 활용하는 타협안이 훌륭한 해결책이라고 생각합니다.

이것은 매우 흥미로운 솔루션인 것 같습니다… @sam @codinghorror @erlend_sh @XieLong

누군가 이 주제에 대해 추가로 작업을 진행했나요? 사용 가능한 플러그인이나 확장 기능이 있나요? 더 많은 분들이 이 토론을 올려주시기 바랍니다. 아니면 제가 찾지 못하는 대체 토론이 따로 있나요…

이것이 채택률을 크게 높이는 데 도움이 될 것입니다…

3개의 좋아요

ㅋㅋ 이거 처음 봤어요. 제가 만든 거랑 정확히 똑같네요:

4개의 좋아요

고마워요! 이것 좀 확인해볼게요!!

1개의 좋아요