Invision Community 5: The all-new editor

[Omri Amos]

1 minute ago, Matt said:

No disrespect, but you've made several leaps of assumption. 😂

Our alpha testers are customers, some self-hosted, some with the cloud platform from all walks of life. They are not picked because they are tech savvy or knowledgable. They are picked because they are articulate, but beyond that they have no special skills. They are your peers.

Any person who OWNS A WEBSITE/FORUM is not a common user... None of the users in this community is a common user IMO.

[Matt]

32 minutes ago, Kirill Gromov said:

1) Is the oembed format parsed as before? Can you center an embedded YouTube video?

2) Do mensions work as before? Is it possible to create a button to embed a record from a database?

1) The embed system works as it does in v4.
2a) Mentions work as you'd expect
2b) Just paste the link in as you'd do with v4.

Just now, Omri Amos said:

Any person who OWNS A WEBSITE/FORUM is not a common user... None of the users in this community is a common user IMO.

Well, you're wrong but I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts.

[Kirill Gromov]

Just now, Matt said:

1) The embed system works as it does in v4.
2a) Mentions work as you'd expect
2b) Just paste the link in as you'd do with v4.

Thanks, but I will need a mentions plugin for db record so that record are inserted as special html tags (as mentions).

[Matt]

Well... that's... somewhat niche.

[Esther E.]

5 minutes ago, Omri Amos said:

Any person who OWNS A WEBSITE/FORUM is not a common user... None of the users in this community is a common user IMO.

I'd argue that a large number of community owners/administrators know their user base, and have a pretty good idea of how new features and changes would be received. Most owners would be looking at this from a perspective of "how well will this do on my site?" and not "how good is this for me personally?"

[Claudia999]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

1) The embed system works as it does in v4.

Does that mean that still not all oEmbed site embeds work (as in v4)? (For example: Embeds from Datawrapper will still not work?)

[David N.]

2 hours ago, Omri Amos said:

Any person who OWNS A WEBSITE/FORUM is not a common user... None of the users in this community is a common user IMO.

I agree with @Omri Amos.

In fact, even by @Matt's definition: 

2 hours ago, Matt said:

Our alpha testers are customers (...). They are your peers.

That means Alpha testers are forum owners. We have experience running a website that contains a forum. 

By contrast, many common users have no clue whatsoever how to use a forum. Some have only a limited understanding of the English language.

Sometimes, I get emails with questions. When I reply that they can't email me their questions, and that they have to post the questions in the forum, they tell me "I don't know where to start, I don't understand how the forum works." 

Another example: many, many new members don't know what "Title" means when they post their first topic, so they enter their username in the "Title" field. 

Your customers (our peers) know better. We have a decent grasp of what a forum is, how it works, and what a topic title is. Don't overestimate most common forum users. Many of them have only limited Facebook or Twitter experience, but zero forum experience, and get lost very quickly. 

I agree that the arrow buttons are confusing (I first encountered similar arrow buttons on a forum powered by Kunena, and at first I couldn't make any sense of them myself, despite my years of experience running a forum). The idea of a clickable interactive area by @13. is a much more intuitive solution. 

Edited May 21 by David N.

[Randy Calvert]

3 hours ago, Omri Amos said:

No disrespect but that's a stupid weird argument. Alpha testers are extremely tech savvy users, they don't represent the common users in any way.

Most of this thread is about needing more buttons to do things...  edit source code, play with styles/headers, fix messed up code, etc.  

I can say with a very high level of confidence these sorts of things are not needed by "common users".  The things being talked about here are things power users want/need.  The vast majority of actual end users will never need more than the default styling options.  

A site admin or major site content producer might need more however...  and I think it's a fair ask for those users to make the request for needing more power in helping them publish.    Those actual end users are happy with the buttons there and don't need more!

Edited May 21 by Randy Calvert

[Matt]

56 minutes ago, David N. said:

By contrast, many common users have no clue whatsoever how to use a forum. Some have only a limited understanding of the English language.

Sometimes, I get emails with questions. When I reply that they can't email me their questions, and that they have to post the questions in the forum, they tell me "I don't know where to start, I don't understand how the forum works." 

Another example: many, many new members don't know what "Title" means when they post their first topic, so they enter their username in the "Title" field. 

This is a different problem completely though and not related to alpha testing a new version of an existing product where our customers who run forums know their users pretty well.

Those that are posting that our way is bad and they have a better idea should probably wait until they've tried it.

The alternative is no arrows or spaces or anything, just like v4 and most people have somehow managed to drag themselves from their primordial soup to figure out how to bash a keyboard in an astethitcally pleasing way enough to leave messages on Invision Community 4.

[Dreadknux]

1 hour ago, David N. said:

I agree that the arrow buttons are confusing (I first encountered similar arrow buttons on a forum powered by Kunena, and at first I couldn't make any sense of them myself, despite my years of experience running a forum). The idea of a clickable interactive area by @13. is a much more intuitive solution. 

It's really not, to be honest. Seriously, this weird "unmarked white space that exists but doesn't really unless you click it" idea is a nonsense - both in usability terms and in WYSIWYG standards. If your community members can't discern what a 'Title' field is, they're definitely not going to figure out whatever esoteric suggestion this is. 🙂

And I dare say that, if you know that your community mostly consists of people who are unable to operate forums, a small change to the post editor is really not going to move the needle for you one way or the other. I also don't know why you would decline to offer email support to people asking for help, but that is probably doing more harm to your cause than a blue arrow button ever could.

48 minutes ago, Randy Calvert said:

Most of this thread is about needing more buttons to do things...  edit source code, play with styles/headers, fix messed up code, etc.  

I can say with a very high level of confidence these sorts of things are not needed by "common users".  The things being talked about here are things power users want/need.  The vast majority of actual end users will never need more than the default styling options.  

Agreed. It's a pretty bizarre argument; "these contextual buttons that add lines above and below a quote box are simply too complicated for the common user! What they really need is a Source button to click on so they can dig into the HTML code, scroll to the line they need on their tiny mobile screen and add extra p tags and div containers!" 😂

[David N.]

12 hours ago, Randy Calvert said:

I can say with a very high level of confidence these sorts of things are not needed by "common users".  The things being talked about here are things power users want/need.  The vast majority of actual end users will never need more than the default styling options.  

A site admin or major site content producer might need more however...  and I think it's a fair ask for those users to make the request for needing more power in helping them publish.    Those actual end users are happy with the buttons there and don't need more!

Indeed, the requests for custom styling buttons or HTML source code are for the admin, or article authors (in the Pages section), not common users. 

The discussion on common users was related to the functionality to add a new line below a quote block. 

11 hours ago, Dreadknux said:

Agreed. It's a pretty bizarre argument; "these contextual buttons that add lines above and below a quote box are simply too complicated for the common user! What they really need is a Source button to click on so they can dig into the HTML code, scroll to the line they need on their tiny mobile screen and add extra p tags and div containers!" 😂

No one made that argument. You're mixing up two different discussions. 

 

[Marc]

Conversation is going around in circles a bit now people. We're happy to hear the reasons people are using source mode in the first place, as it does give us opportunity to see things that may be easily solvable without people having to resort to such measures to achieve the same thing. However the back and forth debate between people on whether or not something is useful is a little futile. What is pointless to one, may not be pointless to another. There is a place for these discussions, and its probably not within a topic showing the new editor.

 

[Sonya*]

14 minutes ago, Marc Stridgen said:

Conversation is going around in circles a bit now people.

I am out. I'll wait until I can test the editor integration on IPS5. Then I can say what I miss. Or I do not miss anything and am unlimited happy. Make me happy, IPS. This would be the best solution for both of us. 😉 

[Matt]

I think it's worth waiting until you can use it. Then get feedback from your members. I'm sure it actually works better than you imagine and that it's quite intuitive.

If you have a reason to use source code beyond fixing CKEditor issues, please let us know and please be as specific as you can which will really help, for example "Embed other sites" is less helpful than "I have a separate website, and I want to bring blog articles into my posts at around 600px high with a scrollbar".

[GazzaGarratt]

On 5/17/2024 at 3:45 PM, Sonya* said:

For records in Pages.

• Tables
• Removing tags, that I cannot remove or repair other ways, like <abbr>-tags
• Adding styles like ipsButton or ipsMessage

On 5/15/2024 at 12:44 PM, Markus Jung said:

Looks good. 🙂

Will it be possible to insert tables, at least with markdown?

Tables, tables and more tables, couldn't agree more! Only type of 'button' that I've been asked for more regularly than anything else and a very logical, common sense fit to any website using this editor box.

Other than that, its great to see all the improvements and I'm sure it'll be well received across the board 😄👏

[TDBF]

2 hours ago, Matt said:

I think it's worth waiting until you can use it. Then get feedback from your members. I'm sure it actually works better than you imagine and that it's quite intuitive.

If you have a reason to use source code beyond fixing CKEditor issues, please let us know and please be as specific as you can which will really help, for example "Embed other sites" is less helpful than "I have a separate website, and I want to bring blog articles into my posts at around 600px high with a scrollbar".

I understand that change does bring uncertainty, especially when people do not see the full picture or people jump to the wrong conclusion based on limited information. Sometimes, you just have to wait for a release and take things from there.

There are times when the edit post button isn't good enough, and I have to edit content via the source code to remove multiple breaks or styling issues due to copying and pasting embedded or other content.

However, I'm more inclined to wait to see how I get along with the new editor before I make an informed decision on what is and isn't needed.

 

[Dreadknux]

7 hours ago, David N. said:

The discussion on common users was related to the functionality to add a new line below a quote block. 

---

No one made that argument. You're mixing up two different discussions. 

If you do not want the solution as presented, because it is apparently "not usable for the common user", what is the alternative? The 'white space' suggestion is not workable, and the only other option is to keep people using the Source button and dig into the HTML, which is even less accessible for the common user. So the two discussions aren't really galaxies apart.

All I'm saying is wait and try it in V5 before declaring things aren't usable by a broad range of users. The users themselves will inform you in a live environment if that is or isn't really the case.

Edited May 22 by Dreadknux

[Dreadknux]

4 hours ago, Matt said:

If you have a reason to use source code beyond fixing CKEditor issues, please let us know and please be as specific as you can which will really help, for example "Embed other sites" is less helpful than "I have a separate website, and I want to bring blog articles into my posts at around 600px high with a scrollbar".

I tend to use the Source button these days simply to debug HTML that kind of goes wonky in custom CKEditor buttons I make. But if IPS adds an 'inline gallery' button in the new editor that allows me to insert groups of images in rows (the same way I can on a Wordpress blog), I won't really have a need to even do that.

I think there's merit to having more advanced functions in the editor that allows for adding custom CSS classes to headers etc so admins/power users can really customise their content, but that's going outside of the realm of "common user" stuff. Just something I think would be great to add as the new editor evolves.

[Kirill Gromov]

When will we see a public alpha test?

[Jimi Wikman]

2 hours ago, TDBF said:

There are times when the edit post button isn't good enough, and I have to edit content via the source code to remove multiple breaks or styling issues due to copying and pasting embedded or other content.

Hmmm...that reminds me, will the new editor have a clear formatting function? I figure that will help with those pesky cut and paste from other tools that add garbage to the text?

[Markus Jung]

8 minutes ago, Jimi Wikman said:

paste from other tools

I use STRG + SHIFT + V for this (Windows).

Edited May 22 by Markus Jung

[Matt Finger]

6 minutes ago, Jimi Wikman said:

Hmmm...that reminds me, will the new editor have a clear formatting function? I figure that will help with those pesky cut and paste from other tools that add garbage to the text?

Yes, there is a clear formatting button, but more importantly the content is stored according to a predefined schema - this means that there will never be random styles or lines that are unexpected, even after pasting. Though you cannot have "whatever wherever however in the source", this becomes a big advantage for everyday users since the entire content state is achievable through the UI.

[Jimi Wikman]

Am I correct to assume that the blue arrows here have designated CSS classes or ID's?

If that is true, then it is possible to style them so then you can have the transparent block below and above if you want. Same functionality and both UI's are possible.

All through the magic of CSS 😉

[Marc]

15 hours ago, Kirill Gromov said:

When will we see a public alpha test?

When its ready ™  😄

Seriously though. Thats the honest answer. We're getting must closer to that state however. 🙂 

[sound]

23 hours ago, Matt said:

I think it's worth waiting until you can use it. Then get feedback from your members. I'm sure it actually works better than you imagine and that it's quite intuitive.

If you have a reason to use source code beyond fixing CKEditor issues, please let us know and please be as specific as you can which will really help, for example "Embed other sites" is less helpful than "I have a separate website, and I want to bring blog articles into my posts at around 600px high with a scrollbar".

Would it not help the discussion if the discussion was split into admin use of the editor and the normal member use?

i certainly have different needs/requirements of the new editor as an admin, espically on the cms article editor side than say a member posting normal forum topics

 

Edited May 23 by sound