I've never hidden my frustrations with XF 1.1's editor (which is based on TinyMCE). In 1.2, we have entirely removed the existing editor and replaced it with a new one based on Redactor:
So obviously this looks quite a bit different--and I know plenty of people didn't like the 1.1 editor look--but the functionality is there. So what advantages do we have? Well there are various ones:
How about some other bigger changes?
Pasting images
If you use Chrome or Firefox and have an image in your clipboard, you can simply paste it into the editor. It will automatically be uploaded as an attachment if possible. If the upload is successful, this works exactly like uploading an image and then clicking the "full image" button.
Note that in Chrome, the image data must be in your clipboard (such as from pressing print screen). In Firefox, you can either have image data or you can copy a file that's an image and paste that.
Drag and drop uploading
Provided your browser supports it, you can now drag files into the editor to upload them:
@User tagging
While not directly related to the editor change, this is probably the best time to mention it. You can use @Mike style syntax to tag users in a post:
Tagged users will receive an alert when they're tagged.
You can obviously turn off tag alerts, but as an admin, you can also limit the maximum users that can be tagged per message as a permission. (So you could disable it for registered members and only allow premium members to tag, for example.)
Alternative smilie inserting approach
The smilie dropdown really didn't work well with a lot of smilies. Clicking the :) button will now do this:
This is now making a call to get the smilies and lays them out with a template. This opens up the possibility for more organization options (though nothing has changed as of this message).
Auto save drafts
While you are typing a message, every X seconds (currently 60), a draft of your message will be saved. If you reload the page later, your message will be automatically re-shown. Drafts will be automatically pruned over time.
Each draft is associated with a particular piece of content, such as a thread, forum, or conversations. A draft reply that you start working on in thread 1 will not be shown to thread 2 and so forth.
Display if messages have been posted since you started your message
Tied into the auto-saving, when you're writing a reply to a thread, we will check to see if any new messages and display a note if there are. You can then display those new posts without reloading the page.
Oh yeah, one more thing on the editor, it's fully responsive:
That should be a hint...
So, when are we going to see this all? Well, we're hoping to have 1.2 running here on XenForo.com in early June. The initial beta release will follow, based on how well the time on 1.2 goes. The final release of 1.2 would be wholly dependent on how the beta process goes.
So obviously this looks quite a bit different--and I know plenty of people didn't like the 1.1 editor look--but the functionality is there. So what advantages do we have? Well there are various ones:
- Much lighter code and faster to load. Redactor depends on jQuery and benefits from that.
- When pasting, most formatting is removed (though some is kept). However, if you're pasting from one XenForo editor to another (or within the same one), all formatting is maintained.
- White space is maintained for code tags when pasting from Webkit. This was an annoyance for a number of people here, myself included.
- The overlays are now consistent with overlays elsewhere in XF.
- Generally, from my perspective, the code is much more adaptable to our needs.
- A bunch of other things I'm going to detail below...
How about some other bigger changes?
Pasting images
If you use Chrome or Firefox and have an image in your clipboard, you can simply paste it into the editor. It will automatically be uploaded as an attachment if possible. If the upload is successful, this works exactly like uploading an image and then clicking the "full image" button.
Note that in Chrome, the image data must be in your clipboard (such as from pressing print screen). In Firefox, you can either have image data or you can copy a file that's an image and paste that.
Drag and drop uploading
Provided your browser supports it, you can now drag files into the editor to upload them:
@User tagging
While not directly related to the editor change, this is probably the best time to mention it. You can use @Mike style syntax to tag users in a post:
Tagged users will receive an alert when they're tagged.
You can obviously turn off tag alerts, but as an admin, you can also limit the maximum users that can be tagged per message as a permission. (So you could disable it for registered members and only allow premium members to tag, for example.)
Alternative smilie inserting approach
The smilie dropdown really didn't work well with a lot of smilies. Clicking the :) button will now do this:
This is now making a call to get the smilies and lays them out with a template. This opens up the possibility for more organization options (though nothing has changed as of this message).
Auto save drafts
While you are typing a message, every X seconds (currently 60), a draft of your message will be saved. If you reload the page later, your message will be automatically re-shown. Drafts will be automatically pruned over time.
Each draft is associated with a particular piece of content, such as a thread, forum, or conversations. A draft reply that you start working on in thread 1 will not be shown to thread 2 and so forth.
Display if messages have been posted since you started your message
Tied into the auto-saving, when you're writing a reply to a thread, we will check to see if any new messages and display a note if there are. You can then display those new posts without reloading the page.
Oh yeah, one more thing on the editor, it's fully responsive:
That should be a hint...
So, when are we going to see this all? Well, we're hoping to have 1.2 running here on XenForo.com in early June. The initial beta release will follow, based on how well the time on 1.2 goes. The final release of 1.2 would be wholly dependent on how the beta process goes.
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, but now at least on my communities, there has been a "facebook-effect " : people only write one-liners (just like here) and apart from smileys and quotes, nobody uses complex text formatting anymore. Of course, ymmv depending on community type, but I wouldn't put too much effort in a working set of tools to put text in colors, change font, justify to the right, or "create tables", in 2012 : the vast majority does not care.
