Pluggable Editors

[sasiflo]

The needs composition and editing various kinds of text (post, comment, mail, webpages, etc.) are very different. Some people want naked text-areas to insert bbcode directly, some want this plus a few buttons for convenience and some want full featured wysiwyg editing for this. To fulfil this we need a pluggable editor infrastructure.

A standard should be defined for the mentioned use-cases. Editors that comes with red directly. Furthermore it should be possible to add alternative editors as addons. As addon we could also use editors licensed under GPL like CKeditor.

Where do we need editors?

Item	Format
Post	bbcode
Comment	bbcode
Mail	bbcode
Webpages	bbcode, markdown, html, plain, etc?
Page Layout Editor	Comanche
Profiles	bbcode
Documentation Pages	bbcode, markdown, html

What editors could be used?

Editor	Formats	License	Website
textarea
bbedit
tinymce	bbcode, html	LGPL	http://www.tinymce.com
ckeditor	bbcode, html	LGPL (+GPL, MPL)	http://ckeditor.com
ace	plain (bbcode, markdown, html)	BSD	http://ace.c9.io
jsvi
ymacs
SCEditor	bbcode, html	MIT	http://www.sceditor.com
WysiBB	bbcode	MIT	http://www.wysibb.com

[friendica]

profiles - bbcode
documentation (if we do this in a core wiki instead of the current adhoc approach) - markdown, bbcode, html

Possible Editors:

textarea
bbedit
tinymce
ckeditor
ace
jsvi
ymacs

[sasiflo]

About Documentation Pages some idea questions: A core wiki? A distributed synced wiki? One global channel for documentation as wiki?

[sasiflo]

Is it right, that beside webpages and docpages all items are bbcode? Or is there some kind of format-info-field? Or plans to add something like that?

[friendica]

A mimetype is attached to every item. This can be anything we provide a display handler for. Currently all conversation items are bbcode. We're leaving open the possibility of letting you use any format you want for conversations, but for practical purposes this is unlikely to happen.

The amount of code needed to support alternate formats in conversations is huge - involving "mostly" duplicated code to parse tags and other special bbcode constructs on submission - as well as convert tools such as parse_url and wall_attach and end-to-end encryption to use alternate formats.

[ghost]

We tried for the documentation wiki, and other than somebody who decided to replace the index with something completely unrelated, nobody used it. The "I don't understand git" thing was, predictably, just an excuse. Overall, a failed experiment. We probably don't need to worry about that one.

[friendica]

If it was just local to your site - and the admin could merge it (if and when desired) with git it might work. Hard to get right, but it might work.

[sasiflo]

So it's correct to state the github wiki documentation as totally outdated? Should be mentioned on the index page I think.

[ghost]

I had a quick look at the wiki and it's (mostly) just "out of date" rather than "wrong", but yeah, you might have a point. The definitive doco has been in doc/ for months. That's how we decentralise it.