Because the editor is in my (and my community's) opinion, a step downward with the loss of BBcode source editing, I was wondering, why not have the option to toggle editor modes (BBcode or html) or even better, support other formats like Markdown or Markdown influenced by Stackoverflow?

Some people of the staff (in my community) want to switch to SMF because of the editor. If just the editor is enough to make someone switch away from the product, then there must be something wrong with it.

Considering Markdown outputs HTML, it wouldn't even be that complex to implement?

HTML is already a standard built-in option.

There are plugins to add markdown support if you want it: http://ckeditor.com/addon/markdown

(The BB code discussion is beating a dead horse. The whole system is switched to full HTML already. There is no turning back to bb code from there.)

1 hour ago, R-023 said:

HTML is already a standard built-in option.

Yes, and that is, as stated, something I would rather not have to use as source editing format.

Just now, opentype said:

There are plugins to add markdown support if you want it: http://ckeditor.com/addon/markdown

(The BB code discussion is beating a dead horse. The whole system is switched to full HTML already. There is no turning back to bb code from there.)

Is there the possibility, that the source mode is on by default (no wysiwyg editor) with something other than HTML then?

The problem with any editing mode other than rich text is that there is a lot of metadata associated with things like quotes, which would be very difficult to support in a language where you can see it all - a quote contains information on the app, class, post ID, topic ID, content type, time, author ID and author username. Some of that information could be condensed, then regenerated on the server side (realistically you would only need the class and post ID to uniquely identify it), but there's still no way of representing any metadata at all in markdown.

If someone can make it work, I would love to see a markdown editor as a user option, but speaking from experience, I can tell you that replacing the stock editor is not easy, though extending it might be possible.

25 minutes ago, Colonel_mortis said:

The problem with any editing mode other than rich text is that there is a lot of metadata associated with things like quotes, which would be very difficult to support in a language where you can see it all - a quote contains information on the app, class, post ID, topic ID, content type, time, author ID and author username. Some of that information could be condensed, then regenerated on the server side (realistically you would only need the class and post ID to uniquely identify it), but there's still no way of representing any metadata at all in markdown.

If someone can make it work, I would love to see a markdown editor as a user option, but speaking from experience, I can tell you that replacing the stock editor is not easy, though extending it might be possible.

Hmm, perhaps the Markdown could be extended to allow definition of metadata? I believe key-value pair metadata is already supported by some engines so technically (although it might be inconvenient to type) markdown elements could have associated metadata blocks or even simmilarly to url definitions;

[an example](http://example.com/ "Title")

One can only dream of the perfect editor

1 hour ago, Brent C said:

One can only dream of the perfect editor

Hate to burst your bubble but there is no such thing. What you may call perfect is complete garbage to someone else  . IPS' job is to find the right blend of each of our "perfects."