Editor Feedback

[TSP]

I'll just mention this as well: http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/bugs.html/_/ip-board/copying-anything-in-the-code-box-and-paste-make-all-text-go-in-straight-line-r40625

It's marked as not a bug, thus why I'm mentioning it here.

Anything that has to do with copy / pasting is kind of operating in a silly fashion. And the case mentioned above actually seems to be working in the CKeditor demo, so I don't know what's that about.

And what's up with stripping indenting/space made in STD when switching to RTE? I believe I've seen that marked as NAB aswell.

[DesignzShop]

About anyone is being taught html and understands "< >" it's pretty much universal.

html needs to work imo - When I paste code I want it to work as pasted including image sizes.

WYSIWYG should be just that, anything less is not getting what you see.

my 2 pennies

[GreenLinks]

About anyone is being taught html and understands "< >" it's pretty much universal.

html needs to work imo - When I paste code I want it to work as pasted including image sizes.

I really wonder which world you are living at. Within the world i live , html is a programming language and is being thought only to people who are interested on programming.

[Kandice]

I'll just mention this as well: http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/bugs.html/_/ip-board/copying-anything-in-the-code-box-and-paste-make-all-text-go-in-straight-line-r40625

It's marked as not a bug, thus why I'm mentioning it here.

Anything that has to do with copy / pasting is kind of operating in a silly fashion. And the case mentioned above actually seems to be working in the CKeditor demo, so I don't know what's that about.

And what's up with stripping indenting/space made in STD when switching to RTE? I believe I've seen that marked as NAB aswell.

Copy and paste in 3.4.1 is indeed strange and a step backward in my opinion. You have to actually be in source mode to paste the text for it to work, or click the code box for a pop and paste the text inside it. But in 3.3 you don't have to do that and just paste it and it parsed your text properly. This will just confused user and most user I think will not switch between mode or hit the code button to paste.

[ADKGamers]

Copy and paste in 3.4.1 is indeed strange and a step backward in my opinion. You have to actually be in source mode to paste the text for it to work, or click the code box for a pop and paste the text inside it. But in 3.3 you don't have to do that and just paste it and it parsed your text properly. This will just confused user and most user I think will not switch between mode or hit the code button to paste.

This is an issue that recently my members found out about and didn't really like it. And it would bring up an error saying you can't use that image extension. . UNTIL they went in to source mode which it would then work.

[Royzee]

Please bring back the quote tags instead of the already formatted gray area.

For one thing, I quite often start a quote from an article on a news forum, then add to the quote ( necessary with many news sites as grabbing the quote you want at once sometimes will include an image ). You cannot reliably add more content to the started quote as it will more often drop it outside and below the quote.

[DesignzShop]

I really wonder which world you are living at. Within the world i live , html is a programming language and is being thought only to people who are interested on programming.

I guess I don't have to ask which part of this world you live in.... Where I live in the US even kids are "taught" not "thought" simple markup in school. Pretty much universal on this part of planet earth! They are not taught bbcode and for good reason imo.

[Bob van Leeuwen]

Here in the Netherlands, we had 2 full hours a week in primary school computer class, as we called it. We had simple things, how to launch a program, and we even had basic HTML markup. So yes, I thing more kids now there way around with the basic HTML tags.

[GreenLinks]

I guess I don't have to ask which part of this world you live in.... Where I live in the US even kids are "taught" not "thought" simple markup in school. Pretty much universal on this part of planet earth! They are not taught bbcode and for good reason imo.

It is 100% normal for an American to think the world resides around their country. However your country and your language are specific to your country. Your English is even not global , European people choose to speak UK English. You are of course extra careful in spelling so that you'll be recognised as a clever dude :) I know how important that is for you when you look at the general US people.

However my point stands , you are just a small point of the world and how many US people knows ? My mom in law , many friends , ex neighbours , ex boss's etc.. none of them as American's know Html .

[ADKGamers]

Please bring back the quote tags instead of the already formatted gray area.

For one thing, I quite often start a quote from an article on a news forum, then add to the quote ( necessary with many news sites as grabbing the quote you want at once sometimes will include an image ). You cannot reliably add more content to the started quote as it will more often drop it outside and below the quote.

I'm kind of up in the air. I like both, but I see your point with adding more to it. If there could be a middle ground then I'd be for that, as I do like the look of the new quotes. . just not how it's delivered.

It is 100% normal for an American to think the world resides around their country. However your country and your language are specific to your country. Your English is even not global , European people choose to speak UK English. You are of course extra careful in spelling so that you'll be recognised as a clever dude :smile: I know how important that is for you when you look at the general US people.

However my point stands , you are just a small point of the world and how many US people knows ? My mom in law , many friends , ex neighbours , ex boss's etc.. none of them as American's know Html .

Is there really a need for these type of attacks towards people? You're derailing the topic more than the other individual might have been and making yourself look like you know what in the mean time.

[Nils]

Since I upgraded my forums from 2.3.6 the overwhelming amount of negative user comments has been about the editor. I regularly get reports about posts getting completely destroyed when editing them or them not displaying like they should. These problems did not occur with 2.3.6. This is a major issue, since writing posts is the whole purpose of a forum. Users may be able to accept their post getting lost once or twice, but after the third time they will probably just give up and go somewhere else.

Now, being a developer myself I realize that this is not necessarily an easy problem. There are a lot of edge cases, there are a lot of different requirements. But the editor is one thing where "works 95% of the time" is just not good enough.

I find it thus very hard to justify how Invision keeps adding new features to IP.Board that are nice to have but not essential (as in 3.4), while such an important component is still not working right. I would be very happy if you could just produce a single stable version for once, without adding a ton of new features that introduce new bugs in every new version. So instead of rewriting the whole editor module for 3.4 (which as we can see introduced a whole new set of issues), why is there still no 3.3.5 that fixes bugs in 3.3.4 that have been reported months ago?

What I think should be done with 3.4 and above:

• Bring back a simple text-only editor with BBCode (or even simple HTML) buttons, like in 2.3.6. Make CKE the default, but let power users change the default both per-user and forum-wide. This will at least give us a reasonable alternative to CKE. The current "light switch" editor is just ridiculous.
• Keep supporting BBCode for custom tags.
• Come up with better testing procedures, including usuability testing. This is obviously not working right, considering the amount of negative feedback that arrived pretty much as soon as the new version came out.

[stoo2000]

On the flip-side, I haven't heard a single complaint about the editor from end users.

[Nils]

I have some users who write large articles with lots of formatting, which may be an explanation why issues are more readily noticed on my forums. But nevertheless, even if you don't get direct complaints, wouldn't you have to agree that there are some major problems with the editor right now?

[stoo2000]

I have some users who write large articles with lots of formatting, which may be an explanation why issues are more readily noticed on my forums. But nevertheless, even if you don't get direct complaints, wouldn't you have to agree that there are some major problems with the editor right now?

The only issue I've encountered is that if you type code tags in the editor, Urls inside are parsed into HTML.

[Hexsplosions]

On the flip-side, I haven't heard a single complaint about the editor from end users.

Ditto, but it will depend on the demographic of the forum. My forum is for astronomers who are largely a part of a more senior demographic, thus they have little use for BBCode. For them the WYSIWYG editor is perfect.

That said, I can see the problems when you are dealing with more adept posted.

[Royzee]

There is also format inconsistency when switching between html and wysiwyg,

cms and Sjv could you please take your fight to IM or some other venue.

[Wolfie]

It is 100% normal for an American to think the world resides around their country. However your country and your language are specific to your country. Your English is even not global , European people choose to speak UK English.

Dude you are such a turkey. I find it amusing how many people (outside of the U.S.) stick up their nose and talk trash about us in such a way that they are usually describing themselves. I should point out that he said, "Where I live in the US," which to me says a specific area within the U.S. and not the U.S. as a whole. I don't know where he resides but around here, computer skills are taught in the public schools. Not sure if it goes into HTML at all or not but it is taught since it's a part of everyday life now. As for a language being global or not, even if it happens to be unofficial, English is considered to be the universal language since it's spoken by more people worldwide than any other language. Just a little tidbit for ya.

Is there really a need for these type of attacks towards people? You're derailing the topic more than the other individual might have been and making yourself look like you know what in the mean time.

Indeed. I find it a bit ironic that the very attitude he complains about, he is showing himself. "You Americans think your way is the best way, but over here we do it this other way and it's much better." Hypocrisy.


Maybe we could all enjoy a nice respectful debate about such things when the editor has been patched up some, to give it a good workout. :smile:

[Rhett]

Cleaned up a little, this is a "Feedback Topic" please provide your feedback and not debate with each other. TY!

[Genestoy]

What I think should be done with 3.4 and above:

• Bring back a simple text-only editor with BBCode (or even simple HTML) buttons, like in 2.3.6. Make CKE the default, but let power users change the default both per-user and forum-wide. This will at least give us a reasonable alternative to CKE. The current "light switch" editor is just ridiculous.

I agree 100% :thumbsup: and let the individual admin decide which is best for their community.

[msg]

When I saw you guys were going to start storing more fully parsed versions of posts in the database I knew we were in for a world of hurt. Here are some suggestions since it's clear this editor has been giving you guys a ton of headaches:

• BBCode is still very useful in allowing users to post things that would otherwise require complex HTML - It also gives us as bbcode creators uniform control of the output. We as a community see that slipping away and it's scary.. more because our communities have come to rely on it.
• CKEditor is barely used as a WYSIWYG editor relative to it's capabilities - the html purifier filter is good, but allow US the flexibility to whitelist tags as well. With purifier now in place you are creating a situation where we can control on a fine-grained level what is allowed to be posted.
• I'd love to be able to turn on other CKEditor features and know they would work - editing tables would be pretty awesome
• The current editor development is becoming so rigidly entrenched in all sorts of custom modifications for the purpose of this software that we as users are losing our own flexibility. For developers it's looking increasingly more like the entire ball for what we can actually do with the editor is in your court.
• Keep BBCODE but try this approach. Make the editor pluggable so we as developers can create alternatives. As long as it can display basic html that's all you need. If it's a plaintext editor show that stuff in the editor in the whitelisted HTML format. If it creates HTML so be it, if it creates BBCode so be it.. but please never ever translate what the user types into the editor when it comes time to edit their post. If I type bbcodes for bold, I should darn well see the bold bbcode tags when I edit it again. When I hard code a source tag, I should still see that later. From that perspective, you should just worry about using HTML purifier and your bbcode parser and be as editor agnostic as possible. SOO much work was created when you try to translate bbcode into HTML and back.. and it ticks people off because it loses what they originally created.
• Make the editor pluggable - NOBODY on my site even wants a WYSIWYG editor since they don't work that well for programmers posting code. This is probably why sites like Stackoverflow use Markdown (kind of like a bbcode variant) instead.

I honestly think you guys have tried to do so much with CKEditor that you turned the process into a nightmare.. and slashing bbcode is the easy way out. Create an editor plugin setup that consists of a class to show the editor, load it, etc. and an accompanying class to parse the input that comes from using that editor. The developer controls BOTH. We as developers should be able to use a standard text processing library to handle what the user types into the editor. And again, never ever ever change what the the user typed in when saving to the database. The rendered versions of posts should be cached.. disk space is cheap these days.

I guess most of what I want has been voiced...all I really want to add is that IPS should stop trying to dumb everything down. Yes, you have power users. Yes, you have casual users. But you shouldn't burden the power users in favor of supporting the casual users. You should be supporting all modes of content submission. This means that if I want to manually type in code tags into the ckeditor, then it should work.

To add to that, people 20 years old and less have no idea that internet didn't exist. For them it is like trying to conceive a phone with a wire.... internet has always exist. TV was always in color. Those users are more capable then we can think of. Give them the tool they will figure out what to do. A user will be as dumb as the teach want to be.

BTW some people do more with their texto and two thumbs on their phone then a HTML editor.

Sorry i could not resit :smile:

Ok Late to the party, maybe the developer meeting has already happend

Why doesn't IPS realize that pretty much all complaints with the editor would be resolved if they added buttons to the standard editor?

My simple suggestion, the best way to approach the editor, think about what people know. ......The answer will be Word or WordPAD or NotePad. If you can get and editor on the front end that looks like this i think we have a winner,

It was ask "..If we have two weeks to works in on the editor what would you....."

My first question how many men/hours do you have at your disposal for those two weeks? ;)

Anyway my request will be to enable better tools to manipulate image in a post. After all the internet is about what we see.

One of those tools will be to allow screen capture, then paste. I have Microsoft OneNote and SnagIT that allow me to capture area of the screen. But each times, i nee to paste in Paint or similar program to save the picture then use the uploader to insert a picture. If we could paste directly in the editor WOW that would be very awesome. Then for the 10 percent who need more, RMB and change the image properties. If we change the size to create a thumbnail, a link will be add so when we click on the picture in the final render post, the picture will be display full size.

If this does not fill the two weeks, let me know and will come back with more :smile:

Hope this request fall into what you ask

[Marcher Technologies]

Shoot me... but I honestly think the point is driven home already.

When the admin's cannot even agree on how the editor should work in the many differing use cases... trying to meet them all is fallacy... abstracting the editor to be replaceable is a sane move IMHO.

How much time do you really want to devote to this stripped CKE Matt? How much time have you already? Give the Admin the choice of editor for thier use-case.

As it stands... can you not agree this CKE is rather.... bare? Even the post above references the simplest of needs the CKE itself allows, resizing and positioning images.

I really don't think anyone enjoys the thought of re-coding in the stripped options, least of all you(been there.... what a bloody awful mess it is merging any CKE plugin into your custom.... thing).

[ZakRhyno]

I like to have more offer then what is currently here.

[mat206]

Shoot me... but I honestly think the point is driven home already.

When the admin's cannot even agree on how the editor should work in the many differing use cases... trying to meet them all is fallacy... abstracting the editor to be replaceable is a sane move IMHO.

How much time do you really want to devote to this stripped CKE Matt? How much time have you already? Give the Admin the choice of editor for thier use-case.

As it stands... can you not agree this CKE is rather.... bare? Even the post above references the simplest of needs the CKE itself allows, resizing and positioning images.

I really don't think anyone enjoys the thought of re-coding in the stripped options, least of all you(been there.... what a bloody awful mess it is merging any CKE plugin into your custom.... thing).

My sincere hope is that there isn't a mentality that "if we just fix the quotes and code bbcodes everything will be okay". To be honest, I think this topic shows that there is a sentiment that admins really do want all sorts of editor options depending on the unique needs of their community. I think the worst outcome would be a mentality that just stripping out bbcode would fix everything. I think my ideal solution is if they make the editor pluggable, but I am okay if they just don't filter bbcode in the editor as well. My community doesn't want ckeditor, but they've learned to live with it's quirks. We'll see how things resolve.

If any developer would look at the template system, the api, the hooks system, etc. and realize just how extensible IPS software is I think they'd be shocked that this doesn't extend to the editor as well.

[MisterPhilip]

Shoot me... but I honestly think the point is driven home already.

Indeed, but I guess we're gunna have to wait to see what IPS does :unsure:

If any developer would look at the template system, the api, the hooks system, etc. and realize just how extensible IPS software is I think they'd be shocked that this doesn't extend to the editor as well.

This, and it is beyond frustrating.

[KT Walrus]

I guess my feeling is that you should make the editor as a plugin and then support several plugin choices (legacy, default, and future preview). Those starting new forums or wanting to be on the leading edge would choose the "future preview" editor. Power users might choose as a preference setting the "legacy" editor. All others would use the "default".

If you implement a good plugin architecture, 3rd parties may also implement other editor plugins and make them available to IPB admins. That is, view the editor plugins just like you view the choice of skin (admins choose the set of skins allowed for the user to choose from, with a default skin choice, and users are free to choose a different skin if allowed by the admin).