[2.0] Extending Markup: Serendipity plugin

[yellowled]

Beware, this is a wild suggestion, which most likely is not very realistic or a long shot at best. I'm gonna propose it anyway.

We have had some trouble with 3rd party WYSIWYG editors in the past as well as markup plugins, most prominently NL2BR, or the combination of WYSIWYG editors plus markup plugins. The latest issues with either one of these even turned out to be a security issue which got some blogs hacked. As far as I understand all of this, it is relatively likely that issues like this might haunt us in the future.

So I wonder: Could we make our little project independent from 3rd party editors? Could we combine the best of all markup plugins into one and turn the Markup: Serendipity plugin into the only thing any user needs to format his content properly? Does this make sense at all?

YL

[Don Chambers]

Shall I delete this thread, or would you like to do it yourself??!! LOL!

Editors are a project of their own. Until an editor developer comes along, I think we are going to need to accept the consequences of bundling in 3rd party code.

[yellowled]

Until an editor developer comes along, I think we are going to need to accept the consequences of bundling in 3rd party code.

I really don't think so. I am not talking about dropping 3rd party WYSIWYG editors altogether -- it would be ludicrous to assume that's possible. The John Doe user is always gonna prefer "something that looks like Word" over a markup language. I'm also not talking about writing our own WYGIWYS editor.

I am a huge fan of markup plugins, especially Textile. However, they don't seem to be very popular among our users. This might as well be the case because they're not active by default. Just think about how many people still use the infamous NL2BR plugin, even together with a WYGIWYS editor. Ever stopped to think about WHY they use it? I think it's because it's active by default, period.

So we have two markup plugin which almost no one uses (Texile and Markdown), one which doesn't do any good (NL2BR) and has a better alternate version (NL2P) which isn't very popular either (as far as I can see), and one which doesn't do much (Serendipity). If we combine the latter with the sensible features of NL2P, we could lose anything but it in the core.

YL

[onli]

If we combine the latter with the sensible features of NL2P, we could lose anything but it in the core.

Note that nl2p probably needs a complete rewrite to be useable as default, cause it really produces some mistakes right now (browser can handle it, but it don't validate). And at the moment i can't think of a way to correct these issues without reworking it more to a proper parser.

At topic: I was in the situation of not wanting to kill nl2p with textile and markdown, not using wysiwyg and being sick of using pure html all the time and the s9ymarkup-plugin was not powerful enough (i missed especially linking stuff). So i made liquid, so far:
*italic*, **bold**, [url linkname], [[imageurl]], [url title linkame], [url].

The one thing missing in my "daily" blogwork is creating lists.

I mention it because as far as i remember, i based it upon the code of s9ymarkup. Extending it was quite easy, not breaking nl2p is also easy if the other markup-plugin don't replace the \nl. So we really could try to continue from there, extending s9ymarkup (or liquid?) if necessary and combine it with nl2p (regarding it as part of the markup-tranformation).

It should be possible to offer this as a default-markupplugin without having to rely on the really powerful and complex textile/markdown-plugins (which i also didn't want to use because i couldn't fix a bug in there), and we could try to prepare the editor to work with that (configure the buttons accordingly).

But of course, it could be a valid alternative to don't change anything in here, or setting textile/markdown as a default. I saw quite some blogengines going the latter route.

[Timbalu]

So we really could try to continue from there, extending s9ymarkup (or liquid?) ...

Hi onli

Why reinventing the wheel, we could use some modified version of this forums js editor or equivalent
http:// board.s9y.org/styles/s9y/template/editor.js
to have text markups, lists, tables, links, etc.

Ian

[yellowled]

But of course, it could be a valid alternative to don't change anything in here, or setting textile/markdown as a default. I saw quite some blogengines going the latter route.

That's the way Textile was actually created. It was built as a replacement to WYSIWYG or HTML markup in Textpattern. However, anyone who has ever used Textile will admit it's not perfect. There are some cases in which it can really misinterpret the formatting commands, i.e. if emoticons are used.

YL

[Don Chambers]

I am not talking about dropping 3rd party WYSIWYG editors altogether --

Sorry - misunderstood.

[onli]

Why reinventing the wheel, we could use some modified version of this forums js editor or equivalent
http:// board.s9y.org/styles/s9y/template/editor.js
to have text markups, lists, tables, links, etc.
Ian

BBCode is the ugliest markup-language ever invented. It is no way an option :)

[yellowled]

BBCode is the ugliest markup-language ever invented.

I agree it's not pretty. Also not very user-friendly. I think it's very popular with coders because they're used to typing square brackets, but the Joe Average user simply thinks it's annoying because they're hard to type on most common keyboard layouts. Also, a lot of people seem to find using i.e. * for bold much more intuitive, maybe because it's used in text-based communication like email as well.

YL

[Timbalu]

OK guys,
I do remember me saying '...modified version...'!
At the end its all the same and ending up with a str_replace o.e.. I thought thats what you called liquid, onli. BBC ist not popular by coders while it is sexy, it is used often while it is more clean to code with. I would never use brackets without having start/stop buttons for them.

[onli]

Ah. You meant the editor of the forum itself?

[gimmel]

I don't think that users really wanted to use markup plugins if there were a really good WYSIWYG editor.
But all those WYSIWYG-Editors are ugly and badly influenced by word. The user should not have the possibility to choose every font he wants in every size, he only should select semantic descriptions like paragraph, list, blockquote and headline. The styling belongs into the CSS file, not into the HTML.
The only editor that fits most of my needs is Aloha. One of the things I'm still missing is dragging images from the desktop to my blog article to upload and insert them. But that's in progress.

In the moment I try to implement all this in my S9Y blog to edit blog entries directly in the frontend (to really see what I get).

[yellowled]

The user should not have the possibility to choose every font he wants in every size, he only should select semantic descriptions like paragraph, list, blockquote and headline. The styling belongs into the CSS file, not into the HTML.

Very, very true. Of course, users usually disagree, but what do they know? One could also make a point that most WYSIWYG editors offer a possibility to disable the non-semantic buttons.

The Aloha editor is something we should definitely keep in mind, especially once frontend and backend make the switch to HTML5.

YL