Will New Xenforo get new CK Editor 4?

[MagnusB]

I think people are confusing TineMCE with xF's implementation of TinyMCE. If I am not mistaken, they made the decision to have reduced functionality in the editor. I have no real problem with TinyMCE, except for the removal of tabulations and how hard it is to add new buttons.

As for the html generated by an editor, I find that most create junk html, especially if you do styling, then undo stylings etc.

 

[James]

I've found the standard tinymce editor easy to create new toolbar buttons for... XenForo's implementation seems to differ though.

 

[MagnusB]

I've found the standard tinymce editor easy to create new toolbar buttons for... XenForo's implementation seems to differ though.

I am not speaking from a developer perspective, but a user perspective. In all honesty, I wouldn't be happy with just a "add button" function, what I really want is a good BBCode editor, that also creates new buttons in the editor. Now there are a few addons that add new bbcodes, but not a button on the editor.

 

[cclaerhout]

I've looked at the TinyMCE autosave plugin. It can be activated very easily, but needs a button to get back save text (this will be possible to add an "orphan button" (button which doesn't work with a bbcode) with the new version of the Button Manager - may be this weekend King will have some time to check what I've send him). It also needs a few tweaks to integrate it with the XenForo templates and phrases system I guess. Otherwise there is this addon, which for me is working.

 

[cclaerhout]

I am not speaking from a developer perspective, but a user perspective. In all honesty, I wouldn't be happy with just a "add button" function, what I really want is a good BBCode editor, that also creates new buttons in the editor. Now there are a few addons that add new bbcodes, but not a button on the editor.

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/custom-bb-code-manager.173/

 

[Digital Doctor]

The answer might be a better implementation of TinyMCE in Xenforo.

Now the XenForo version of TinyMCE is not directly using the Bb Code version. It's a modified HTML version that parse/unparse HTML code on the fly (html=>bbcode/bbcode=>html). That's a good system, except for one thing: each line is wrapped with <p></p> html tags. So if a text block is using an align center, then all its lines will have this style <p style="text-align:center"></p>, which is not that good because when XenForo catches those lines to transform them to bbcode, the bbcode [ center ] is applied to all of them instead of only wrapping the text block.
That is for me the major problem of this system.

 

[MagnusB]

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/custom-bb-code-manager.173/

I have looked at it, but I have never installed it, for some reason. I think it was because I spent some time styling a spoiler tag and didn't want to do it again. Also, I am lazy.

 

[cclaerhout]

The answer might be a better implementation of TinyMCE in Xenforo.

Here's an example of the code:

<p style="text-align: center;">[quote]This is a quotation 1</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">This is a quotation 2</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">This is a quotation 3</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">This is a quotation 4</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">[/quote]</p>

The replacement to Bb Codes is made with Regex. It's hard to tell the system: do this replacement but not this one. I hope they will find a way.

 

[Digital Doctor]

The replacement to Bb Codes is made with Regex. It's hard to tell the system: do this replacement but not this one. I hope they will find a way.

That seems quite difficult.
Would think it needs an overhaul.

 

[dutchbb]

It's a shame that a 2012 forum software still uses the tiny TinyMCE.

It's a shame no forum solution create their own IMO. I can't say I like any of them.

 

[Digital Doctor]

It's a shame none of them create their own IMO.

It's best not to.
keeping up with all the browsers requires full time staff.
For small Xenforo, it wasn't a good option.

 

[dutchbb]

It's best not to.
keeping up with all the browsers requires full time staff.
For small Xenforo, it wasn't a good option.

In case of a young XF I understand it 100%.

 

[cclaerhout]

It's a shame no forum solution create their own IMO. I can't say I like any of them.

They already have created this ... in vBulletin 3 But it was too difficult to customize.

 

[Luxus]

Now the XenForo version of TinyMCE is not directly using the Bb Code version. It's a modified HTML version that parse/unparse HTML code on the fly (html=>bbcode/bbcode=>html). That's a good system, except for one thing: each line is wrapped with <p></p> html tags. So if a text block is using an align center, then all its lines will have this style <p style="text-align:center"></p>, which is not that good because when XenForo catches those lines to transform them to bbcode, the bbcode [ center ] is applied to all of them instead of only wrapping the text block.

That is for me the major problem of this system. But again. Shame is a strong word which I think doesn't fit here.

Granted CK Editor has this very same problem, just checked.

 

[dutchbb]

They already have created this ... in vBulletin 3 But it was too difficult to customize.

I know, and I actually like that one. Simple yet effective, I can easily change it too. But I'm sure they could come up with something better now apart from third party solutions which to me are cluttered and slow.

 

[James]

I wrote the WYSIWYG editor for vBulletin 3 and its updates for 3.5, along with Mike, Scott and Freddie. We did that because at that time there was no better solution available, so we had to make our own. The same is not true now, both TinyMCE and CKEditor do a much better job (when properly integrated) than the vB 3.x editor ever could, and you will have seen that both IPB and vBulletin are now in the process of ditching their own editors.

The long and the short of it is that keeping up with the crappiness of browsers and their wildly varying WYSIWYG implementations is a highly intensive task, and one that is best suited to those who don't have the rest of the application to worry about.

I don't foresee a time where we consider that it would be economical or useful to write our own WYSIWYG editor for XenForo.

I can't give you a more official quote than this. Origin

 

[DRE]

Put aside the autosave, which options are you talking?

By the way the autosave feature is a plugin of TinyMCE that is inside the XenForo plugin directory but hasn't been activated (I didn't look further). There's also a XenForo addon for it.


If I remember what I read, there's only 1 man who did the code (except plugin) and fixes the bugs. And this man made an open source editor on his own time and provides it with an open source licence.

Again it's easy to criticize but if you don't support this guy, show him at least a little respect to him and his work.

It still sucks on xenforo though. When something sucks so hard, it becomes garbage because you don't want to deal with it.

Think... tinymce being Joss Whedon's original script for Alien Resurrection, which was awesome, but after being changed by several movie execs, became some watered-down garbage.

It sucks so bad that even if it gets fixed, I don't wanna look at it. I'm thoroughly traumatized by it. Bring on CKEditor!

 

[Shelley]

I've been told it's in development

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/alpha-and-beta-testers-for-ckeditor.34413/

No ETA as of yet

I'd prefer CKEditor over tinymce (I'm sure i said this before) the only problem i have is the smiley add-on I'm using is built around tinymce so ckeditor is not a solution for me since I waited 2 years for a smiley add-on solution for xenforo that i'm using now and it's still undergoing development. Obviously if xenforo introduced ckeditor to the core I'd have no choice but to use it.

I've never personally liked Tinymce, it feels clunk, lots of annoying quirks with it but I guess you just have to make do with what we have have.

 

[Steve F]

The developers tested ckeditor but I believe their reason for not using it was that it requires a licence for commercial use... That's just from memory I can't remember if it's 100% accurate.

Let's take a step back from the vitriol and look again at what has been said.

The YUI editor: I see nothing to recommend the use of the YUI editor in XenForo. For a start, we build on a jQuery platform, and including the YUI editor would require including YUI, which would add very significant extra weight to pages that contain the editor - which include thread_view - the most commonly-loaded of all pages.

Custom editor: I've said before, and I think convincing arguments have been reiterated in this thread, that there is no appetite or viable reason to write a bespoke editor for XenForo. There are good solutions available under Open Source licenses, and it would be bordering on idiocy to think that a proprietary editor would be as robust in the rapidly-changing browser environment as the big projects our there already.

Ability to replace TinyMCE: Yes, of course TinyMCE is tightly integrated into XenForo - it would not work if it were not so. Replacing any editor with another represents a major challenge, and is not to be undertaken lightly. That does not mean it is inextricably tied into the software with no ability to change it, just that doing so is a lot if work, and must be prioritised against the rest of the huge queue of tasks facing XenForo development.

Why TinyMCE? When we started out, we evaluated a lot of editors for suitability. Of all that we tested, TinyMCE was the best fit. Yes, it has annoying bugs, but the others had more, and in some cases they were show-stoppers. Recently, CKEditor fixed a major bug that was a significant factor in it's rejection from our selection process, so in time we may revisit a TinyMCE / CKEditor swap, but that time is not yet.

Seems like TinyMCE was selected because it was the lesser of 2 evils. Kinda like voting for a president.

 

[cclaerhout]

It still sucks on xenforo though.

That's quite an argumentation. Thanks.