XF 2.1 Froala Update and Text Editor Customization

[El Porcharo]

I was looking if there was a way to restrict elements of the text editor differently among each user group, but I see there's no options at all where to decide how formattable the text should be... Or did I miss something?

In the middle of my search, I found out that the integrated editor is called Froala, so I searched a bit further and I could see that their latest version is 3.1, which is way different from the one included in the latest XenForo version (2.1.8 p2).

Any chance that this Froala 3.1 could be implementend in future XenForo updates?

Have a look at how amazingly different it has become at their demo page! I love it!

 

[Joe Kuhn]

I like their special characters, but I see they simply replace tab characters with 4 spaces regardless of the field width... I sent their support team the following question per my work on pasting spreadsheet data into their editor and keeping the columns aligned. We'll see what they say.

I see that you replace each tab character with 4 spaces. I wonder if there's some type of add-on that would treat each tab character as a delimiter per a given field width. The reason I ask is because I see plenty of alignment problems pasting Excel spreadsheets into editors. They all replace the tabs with 4 or 8 characters regardless of the characters already used in the field. This messes up the alignment. For example, in an 8 character field, if I use up 3 of the characters with '123' and then have a tab as in:

123[tab]

The tab should really be replace with 5 spaces, not 8 in order to keep the alignment true with the next field. Do you have anything like this available?.

 

[Chris D]

Can you explain specifically the features you are excited about?

The editor itself isn't actually much different at all, although it looks slightly different. One of the reasons it looks slightly different is that is has a new icon font which makes the icons look different (and slightly larger). We probably wouldn't use that though and we'd probably restyle it to use the existing Font Awesome icons so we don't have to include multiple icon fonts.

So that would make it look fairly similar to what we have already.

You may have identified certain features in their demo that we don't have, but that will remain to be the case even if we updated to version 3 as we only support a subset of the features in BB code.

 

[El Porcharo]

Nothing in particular, I liked the overall layout and use of it.

It looks like the interface is completely different along with the items handling systems.

Pictures for example have a few extra options and the overall look of the editor is more compact, the formatting bar is split in submenus with only the average most used items on the main level which is visible.
This could avoid inexperienced forum users to feel overwhelmed by so many buttons above their "write-something" field: I'm thinking about all those people used to the Facebook post/comment fields, that are only a sort of hole where you can write, while the most exciting thing you can do is hitting the "PUBLISH" button (don't know how it's called in the english version )

What about the possibility to restrict the complexity by user group? Would that be possible? I was thinking about leaving just the basics to regular users, more options to moderators , and all the buttons to admins. ☺

 

[djbaxter]

The default editor icon set is already pretty stripped down.

If you want more control:

Editor & BB Code Manager

katsulynx submitted a new resource: [KL] Editor Manager - Customize Your WYSIWYG-Editor & BbCodes. [KL] Editor Manager Description Fully customize your XenForo Froala instance. Change your toolbar layout, enable and disable BB Codes, make use of the new table and background-color BB Codes...

xenforo.com

 

[Chris D]

If you want more control, there is a editor button manager built into the software since XF 2.1 and an add-on isn't required.

 

[El Porcharo]

I'll have a deeper look then, couldn't find anything 'till now... although I was sure I've seen something the very first time I put my hands on XenForo

Thanks both ❤

 

[Jrg]

• the design looks more clean and modern to me, I guess mainly because it's not so packed in the main menu
• the table menu improved for good
• also the lists and the insert image improved I'd say

 

[Chris D]

Inserting lists, images and tables is the same as the current version. There is some unnecessary functionality that we just don’t use or expose however.

 

[sbj]

List of things I would like to have from the new Froala:

• special characters important for non-English-speaking boards, so we can give the option to use characters from our alphabets.
• Font Awesome button.
• new image options.
• insert horizontal line
• download as PDF
• select all
• paragraph style (maybe good for writing articles)
• When you insert something, you have now 3 options, which makes it more clear.

 

[djbaxter]

Custom BBCode for horizontal line (horizontal rule):

Title: Horizontal Rule

BB code tag: hr
Replacement mode: Simple replacement
Supports option parameter: No
HTML replacement: <br /><hr>
Editor icon: Font Awesome icon ruler-horizontal
Example usage: [hr][/hr]

Advanced options:

Within this BBCode: Display HTML replacement when empty