WYSIWYG Plugin (again)

[P16]

@Rob_Nicholson what I did to get around the issue was remove the buttons toolbar, and remove the preview on the right. Then I centered the editor, made the preview pane optional (it opens on top of the editor on click. The only buttons I needed were the Emoji and the Upload Picture buttons, which I added at the extreme right, making it similar to a phone UI. Most people will just write unformatted text, and for now this should suit you fine.

In a few months, one of us will get around to making a plugin for wysiwyg, so I guess we just have to be patient.

[Tom_Newsom]

Yeah, you can just hide all the formatting buttons with CSS. The only issue comes when people use markdown by accident and wonder why they don’t Get What They Saw.

[elijah (Eli the Bearded)]

You could even use the same number over and over again. That’s what I’m always doing…

That is indeed a very convient way to do it. Shame having that in the parser makes it hard to start reponse with year period. Like “When did you start hating Markdown? \n\n 2014. That’s when I started actually using Markdown.”

[Rob_Nicholson]

Another “problem” is typing #1 at the start of a line

#1 which turns it into this

Try explaining “escape codes” to a non-technical user…

I suppose this summarises my reservations about a markdown editor - normal users don’t expect something weird to happen when they type a letter. if they press “#” then they expect “#” to appear on the screen - always.

[ccdw (Christopher W)]

@Rob_Nicholson

Try explaining “escape codes” to a non-technical user…

Being able to disable markdown within comments would be a start - although in my view the original post content itself still needs the ability to add H1, H2, bold etc.

@P16

In a few months, one of us will get around to making a plugin for wysiwyg, so I guess we just have to be patient.

I was originally hopeful, but after considerable research I very much doubt that there is much appetite for this to be developed by third party developers, not least because of the ongoing maintenance issues associated with third party plugins. And if maintenance isn’t proactive, imagine building up your community and then upgrading to an essential release only to find most of your existing posts are ill formatted.

Here’s Sam’s view on the scope of the problem from Who would prefer a standard wysiwyg to markdown?:

@sam

You got to have some perspective on the enormity of the problem.

A forum that has been, from day zero, WYSIWYG is probably reasonably straight forward to build and would only take 2-12 weeks of development as a plugin, there are real challenges around quoting, but quite a few options to shop from and you can strip out lots of features.

However, a WYSIWYG editor that co-exists with our Markdown hybrid editor is an impractical project to embark on. Going back and forth from Markdown to WYSIWYG is just too big of a project, and would always cause annoying reformatting of Markdown.

As it stands we have huge amounts of debt with our editor we got to repay, multiple weeks of engineering are required to move us to CommonMark, this is where we are going to invest our efforts. It would spread us way too thin to be also building a “WYSIWYG” option.

I much prefer investing effort in refining our current solution than jumping ship. There are tons of refinements left: “synchronizing” preview, to interacting and resizing images in preview.

[Rob_Nicholson]

I was originally hopeful, but after considerable research I very much doubt that there is much appetite for this to be developed by third party developers,

Yes, I’d prefer a solution to be part of the core software as it’s an important part of the overall system from an end-user point of view. They will spend most time reading posts, then navigating and then writing posts themselves.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

I am closing this topic, sorry.

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