Yes I agree (Peggy) that the inclusion of Pages in XF is fantastic. That's why I'm so keen to add in the missing bit to make them really usable. Otherwise they are going to be of very limited use. I'm reminded of the vb Groups feature which was a great idea but never listened to urgent requests to link the Groups to forums so the feature withered.
Having pages that have the forum header, footer, side menu of links, usergroup permissions, displayed in the forum hierarchy, is just FANTASTIC.
Logician's page templates have been consistently a top favourite mod on vb.org and may even have inspired Paqges here. Having worked with Logician's page templates for a couple of years
which DO have an optional bbcode editor you can use right on the page itself - I know it's still necessary to use html if you want anything beyond the basic in a page. Logician's mod lets you choose which you need.
But you can do quite a lot with the kind of basics a bbcode editor does.
So if you want just one column of text with paragraphs, alignment, font size, colour, italic, bold, smilies, inserted links, and graphics incl. alignment, you can do that with the bbcode editor.
That's actually a lot!
Just like writing a forum message except you click a link on the page to open the editor, which you can only do if you're in a usergroup permitted to edit that particular page. Note permission per page not all pages.
Any more like tables - columns, bordered boxes, designated sections etc you have to do with html.
But I do have pages I create the table in html and the WYSWYG editor can be used to update text or graphics. That is wonderfully easy and quick for me and my mods do not need html to add notes to update the page. If the page has table layout and I want them to add notes to a particular table cell I put an alert in, in small italics, alerting them to how to add their notes. As long as they only ADD stuff to existing text, or edit their own text, there is no problem.
I can make very fast updates myself in seconds - which means because it's so quick and easy I am much more likely to do it! So I don't have these pages hanging around going stale with out of date stuff. Yes I could do it in html but that means go and open my html editor, return to the page, copy/paste a section of page over into my html editor, edit the bits I want, then copy/paste it back into the admincp page. Then check in user view it's tuurn ed out the way I want. Alternatively I can type out all those html brackets by hand - no thanks.
Much much more user friendly to just use the facility that I'm using right now - the WYSWYG editor we use for messages.
Now Floris earlier described a solution using custom dir tinymce - I didn't understand it but Floris generally knows his coding so I'm sure it's a runner. Except you have to be better than me to implement it. Here's the post.
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/pages.489/page-7#post-42995
Then Kier said
The biggest obstacle to adding a WYSIWYG editor to the Pages editor is the fact that it would block your ability to use XenForo template syntax within the page, which rather completely defeats the point of the system, in my opinion.
I confess I don't understand that either.
What would I be unable to do? Use bits of the forum code? In Logician's templates I can put
Welcome $user
or whatever that vbcode is I forget exactly, and the user sees their username on the page. Is that the kind of thing you mean WYSWYG would block Kier?
It doesn't conflict on Logician's templates. I've had both on one page. I have to put the bits of vbcode in at admincp/ html level but it's also possible to do simple quick update edits using the WYSWYG - and permitting my mods to do that too.
However if XF is different in this case so we can't have both WYSWYG and XF template syntax on the same page, I think I'd like the choice please on what is important to me on that particular page. There are lots of Pages I wouldn't need the template syntax in my content if I've understood rightly what that is.
A note in admincp when you're setting the page up -
"You can either simply manage a Page in html, or enable a WYSWYG editor. A combi approach is to set up the layout in html and then enable WYSWYG for quick update edits .
Note you cannot have WYSWYG editing if you want to include XF template syntax in that Page e.g. {example}."
Please please WYSWYG - I know some don't want it but some of us DO.
Re-reading this thread which I have right from the beginning over 11 pages, that is abundantly clear.
Choice please?
