Interest in a WYSIWYG plugin

Ruby Apps Radiant CMS
1

All,

My team is researching the plugin architecture of Radiant and the
plan is to develop a WYSIWYG editor for Radiant that is similar to
what is used in Wordpress. I am willing to contribute the code we
develop if there is an interest in the community for it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~*~
Todd B.
[email protected]
858-752-1459
11814 Westview Parkway
Unit #176
San Diego, CA 92126

2

On 10/6/06, Todd B. [email protected] wrote:

My team is researching the plugin architecture of Radiant and the plan is to
develop a WYSIWYG editor for Radiant that is similar to what is used in
Wordpress. I am willing to contribute the code we develop if there is an
interest in the community for it.

Even a preview function with the plain-text editor would be a nice
step…

-Chris

3

WYSIWYG is a call for trouble. Less (Markdown, Textile) is more.
Encourage
people to think about content visually and you get instant mess. By
using
HTML or plaintext markup, content editors are forced (in a good way) to
think about content semantically and to leave the styling, font sizes,
image
position and floating to the designer.

However, that’s just me. There still might be interest in the community.
I
just saw what WYSIWYG did to people (in MS Word, Dreamweaver, other
CMS-s…) and decided giving control to content editor is not exaclty
smart.

4

WOW! There is an extreme interest by me. I still feel
like a newbie to Rails and Radiant, but I’m really
hoping that a few sites that I have done in Wordpress
& Drupal can be converted to using Radiant. I love the
flexbility with radius tagging and behaviors.
Unfortunately, without WYSIWYG editing I know it’s a
tough sell for my clients. I think textile is awesome
but for the non-technical person they really need a
WYSIWYG editor. I was planning to start hacking
something together myself using TinyMCE.

http://johnwulff.com/articles/2006/05/31/tinymce-with-ruby-on-rails

Would this editor plug-in you are talking about also
support image uploads? at the least it would be nice
to integrate with another plug-in allowing user’s to
upload resources.

— Todd B. [email protected] wrote:

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5

I agree that while adding WYSIWYG editing is just about the worst
thing that you can do to a website (at least in terms of proper
markup), every client that I have ever worked with has wanted
something like Microsoft Word in which they could write their pages.

While I wish that everyone would write in Markdown/Textile, most
clients have absolutely no desire, inclination, or time to learn how
to write markup … even simplified markup. Not only that, but as
fantastic as Markdown and Textile are, they still leave much to be
desired when working with anything other than text (images, flash,
etc.)

The question then isn’t how do we convince clients that using a
WYSIWYG is wrong, rather the question is how do you lock down the
WYSIWYG editor just enough that they can do most of the things that
they want without compromising the design of the site.

Hopefully I’ll have my WYSIWYG patch finished soon. I used TinyMCE for
the editor (along with a few tweaks of my own) and once you limit some
of TinyMCE’s functionality and explain why it needs to be limited to
the client, everyone seems to be happy (of course YMMV).

Note: for those interested in my WYSIWYG patch mentioned in an earlier
thread, I’ve worked in image uploading. It’s still rough around the
edges (especially in the looks department), but it works well enough
for my clients that I haven’t gotten a single “how do I …?” call
from them.

6

Hi,

check out the page_parts patch on the trac, it is a very simple patch
that
allows a developer to extend the admin interface, it allows for
different
page parts, one of the extensions I uploaded alowes uploaded before to
the,
another has a wysiwyg editor (based on fckeditor) instead of the text
editor, one allows for multiple uploads of file for galleries.

I know there are a few people that use this patch and are pretty happy
with.

Sean, I do not think this requires a fork, neither do any of the things
you
mentioned as long as they are done in a form of an extension, so you can
add
or change different parts of the radiant functionality. similar to the
way
Drupal allows extensions by having a big list of places you can plugin
and
changes/extend the framework functionality.

Dror

7

In my full-time job, we are considering a large-scale CMS that includes
a
WYSIWYG editor. Many of them nowadays limit or have options to limit
what
kind of formatting can be applied to the output. I agree with the
overall
sentiment that Radiant itself does not need a WYSIWYG, but I can
understand
why some people might want it, and thus it should be a plugin. In my
mind,
there are a few other things that need to happen if you’re going to add
WYSIWYG, most of them having to do with users/groups/permissions etc.
Sounds like a branch/fork/huge plugin to me!

Sean C.
seancribbs.com

8

On 10/6/06, Justin G. [email protected] wrote:

I think textile is awesome
but for the non-technical person they really need a
WYSIWYG editor.

No, for the non-technical person they really need to become more
technical.
This isn’t 1999 when websites were toys - today we care something about
semantics and accessibility. I think we should stop saying “here is your
text box, enter content in it the way it looks good to you”.

I’ve introduced Textile markup to many (Markdown, because of indenting
semantics, is not my choice for textboxes) young people and they never
had
any trouble getting it. As for the ignorant older people who just want
to
put stuff online without caring about anything you tell them, I wouldn’t
even let them near textboxes.

9

Dror et al,

Yes that’s what I was saying, if you reread ;). Plugins!

Mislav, this could become similar to the Dave T./DHH thing about
composite primary keys. Essentially, some people need WYSIWYG in their
scenario and they should develop it and use it. That doesn’t mean it
has to be in the core, and it doesn’t mean that Radiant needs to change
its focus. While I think your passion for Textile and Markdown is
great, some users would hate being forced to use something that doesn’t
look like a word processor… just keep that in mind. One size doesn’t
fit all which is why there are so bloody many CMS products out there.
Radiant isn’t for everyone and we love it that way :-D.

Sean C.
seancribbs.com

10

[…] I agree with the overall
sentiment that Radiant itself does not need a WYSIWYG, but I can understand
why some people might want it, and thus it should be a plugin. In my mind,
there are a few other things that need to happen if you’re going to add
WYSIWYG, most of them having to do with users/groups/permissions etc.
Sounds like a branch/fork/huge plugin to me!

From a core developer perspective note that a single gigantic patch
(or even worse a fork) doesn’t help us any. Rather the developer of
this functionality should focus on identifying the facilities that
Radiant currently lacks of modifying the admin pages. If someone comes
up with a clear-cut mechanism to modify the admin pages
in_the_process of developing this WYSIWYG extension we would benefit
from the results significantly.

The long term goal is to be able to modify the admin pages.
Functionality such as a WYSIWYG editor comes naturally with a good
underlying software architecture. But functionality for its own sake
will not survive.

–
Alexander H.
http://www2.truman.edu/~ah428