replacing TinyMCE with YUI, realistic? Yes/No?

User

Well-known member
I suppose this may be more of a question for add-on coders rather than K&M but I personally find TinyMCE and its buggyness infuriating, i.e.:

- slow load of link/picture/media overlay
- paste bold text, inability to un-bold it
- paste link, try to type after pasted link, good luck!
- etc. etc. etc .

Every time I do anything other than just type there's a good chance something doesn't work right and by blood pressure will spike ultimately resulting in an aneurism and sudden death.

I would like to avoid that, and I never ever had any issues with YUI. It's snappy, it just works, and doesn't have all the infuriating "features" of TinyMCE.

So my question is, how difficult would it be to just rip this POS TinyMCE out of Xenforo and replace it with YUI?
 
Not another TinyMCE Aneurysm death !
Alternatives are nice. But I think there are major implications to editor changes.
There are a few things with TinyMCE, but I don't find them a huge barrier.
Chrome + Xenforo + TinyMCE works fine for me.
YUI ? I didn't even know they had an editor.
Does it work with BBcode ?
 
Not another TinyMCE Aneurysm death !
Ha! See that's how mad I was, I couldn't even type right! ;)

There are a few things with TinyMCE, but I don't find them a huge barrier.
If users only get half as worked up as I do over the issues then TinyMCE is a total deal breaker.
The thing is that I compare this editor to the one that comes with vB, and the vB one wins in speed and reliability.

YUI ? I didn't even know they had an editor.
Does it work with BBcode ?
I thought that's what vB is using, though I could be mistaken about it. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/editor/
 
Ha! See that's how mad I was, I couldn't even type right! ;)

If users only get half as worked up as I do over the issues then TinyMCE is a total deal breaker.
The thing is that I compare this editor to the one that comes with vB, and the vB one wins in speed and reliability.

I thought that's what vB is using, though I could be mistaken about it. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/editor/
I hope you mean vB3 as the new vB4 has even more issues.

Also vB3 used a custom editor afaik, and was complained about for years which has lead to them looking into them replacing it.
 
Comparing it to vB 3.8.6, never had any issues with the editor in there, it just works. Almost willing to bet money that it's YUI 2 based ..., almost ... ;)
 
Comparing it to vB 3.8.6, never had any issues with the editor in there, it just works. Almost willing to bet money that it's YUI 2 based ..., almost ... ;)
Forsaken is correct. The editor was bespoke.

I suspect it'd be a major nightmare to replace the editor with the YUI one.
 
Forsaken is correct. The editor was bespoke.

I suspect it'd be a major nightmare to replace the editor with the YUI one.

Mike,

why don´t you code your own custom editor ?
why to rely on buggy 3rd party editors?
 
YUI is not what you mean as I hope
I did want to put something about this but
TinyMCE vs CKeditor

but becz IB used it but ... I love it for ages ... before the change of the name

Look at IPB how they integrated very sleek not the fail of IB ....
 
Mike,

why don´t you code your own custom editor ?
why to rely on buggy 3rd party editors?

There is a difference in Third Party and Open Source. If you know the specific issues then you better go and fix it there only, instead of creating a custom wheel. So that others get benefit from your modification as well.

IMHO, there are many more high priority stuff to finish first. This buggy TinyMCE took countless Man-Hours to reach to its current state, do you think, custom one from scratch will be a piece of cake?

Well, I am sure, at some point they might think of writing custom editor. Which will be part of iterative enhancement of the platform. As they are doing with Zend framework. Using some of its modules to get started, then replacing portions of it with their custom codes. :-)
 
This buggy TinyMCE took countless Man-Hours to reach to its current state, do you think, custom one from scratch will be a piece of cake?
This is a point well taken, I don't think a custom editor is the answer.

I also don't think that participating in TinyMCE development is the answer either because just like writing your own editor it will take countless hours to get familiar enough with TinyMCE to even begin to understand where some of its problems may be coming from yet alone to find the time to fix them.

Between the YUI editor developed by Yahoo (for their own use and released into the wild) and perhaps the Google's Closure Library Editor which runs on Gmail and other Google properties so users already have the content cached there seem to be better choices out there. Granted, I know nothing about how BB code integrates with either of those.

My point is that while I may be reacting more strongly than most to the TinyMCE issues those issues affect every single Xenforo user every time they make a post that triggers some buggy behavior. That's hundreds of thousands, if not millions (of future) triggers per day. Because of that it at least to me seems worthy to fix rather sooner than later.
 
Mike,

why don´t you code your own custom editor ?
why to rely on buggy 3rd party editors?

As Kier has stated on more than one occasion, there's absolutely no logical reason to code your own custom editor when there are solutions like TinyMCE and CKEditor that does the job equally as well, and meets 100% of all requirements.

Back when they coded vBulletin 3, that wasn't the case. Therefore why bother reinventing the wheel? You save time on development and instead focus on more important aspects of development.
 
As Kier has stated on more than one occasion, there's absolutely no logical reason to code your own custom editor when there are solutions like TinyMCE and CKEditor that does the job equally as well, and meets 100% of all requirements.

Back when they coded vBulletin 3, that wasn't the case. Therefore why bother reinventing the wheel? You save time on development and instead focus on more important aspects of development.

the editor is the main part of user-engagement and it is behaving buggy as reported already a couple times.
 
the editor is the main part of user-engagement and it is behaving buggy as reported already a couple times.

Very true, but look at things from an overall development process. Two guys working on an editor PLUS the entire XenForo Forum and Platform? Certainly that's overextending a person.
 
Very true, but look at things from an overall development process. Two guys working on an editor PLUS the entire XenForo Forum and Platform? Certainly that's overextending a person.

yeah I know.
However, having a custom and also bug-free editor will give XenForo an additional competitive advantage over other Forum-software.
I have no doubts Mike and Kier are able to create a better editor than any of those already existing.
 
yeah I know.
However, having a custom and also bug-free editor will give XenForo an additional competitive advantage over other Forum-software.
I have no doubts Mike and Kier are able to create a better editor than any of those already existing.
But there's no need, especially with the time it would take to make a new custom editor. On top of that, do you know just how many issues arise from browser behavior that would need to be resolved? It would likely be a never-ending thing they would have to deal with.

Browsers do some strange things with no explanation sometimes, and if Kier and Mike can save themselves the time and effort by relying on dedicated teams elsewhere that focus only on the editor, the better it's spent on developing other aspects of XenForo.
 
yeah I know.
However, having a custom and also bug-free editor will give XenForo an additional competitive advantage over other Forum-software.
I have no doubts Mike and Kier are able to create a better editor than any of those already existing.

Exactly how does it provide XenForo a competitive advantage? Solutions like WordPress, vBulletin, IPB are all using CKEditor or TinyMCE. Both are highly extensible, and have several years of extensive development.

In fact, I'd argue it would provide XenForo a strategic disadvantage because resources are being funneled elsewhere needlessly when existing solutions does the job as well, if not better, than coding from scratch.
 
Top Bottom