[2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Mark threads with "[2.0]" for discussions about features in the longer-term future, "[1.6]" is for short-term. This is not the place for general discussions or plugin or template requests. Only features that are approved to happen by the core team should be listed here for better structuring.
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yellowled
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[2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Post by yellowled »

The bundled WYSIWYG editor Xinha is, frankly, a pain in the rear end. As far as I remember, it has introduced security issues, it's plain ugly, and I just now discovered that it makes it harder to get the new backend responsive.

While having a responsive backend might not be the primary goal of the new backend, it is an interesting one, especially given the fact that there is (to my knowledge) no blog editor or app which works properly and flawlessly with s9y. So a responsive backend would be the easiest way to make sure people can edit blog posts etc. on tablets and maybe even smartphones in the future.

So why do we keep Xinha as the default WYSIWYG editor anyway? For consistency? Licensing? There is no “perfect” WYSIWYG editor out there, but surely there are better options than Xinha, e.g. CKEditor (formerly FCKEditor, which we already have a plugin for) or even Aloha. Are they harder to integrate? Is Xinha wired too deeply into s9y to get rid of it? Or could we actually make the switch for 2.0 (or even earlier)?

YL
Timbalu
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Re: [2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Post by Timbalu »

A switch to the much better maintained CKE would be a good step, IMO. Since we had this issue with Xinha some years ago, its development seems to have stopped at all.

I don't think that it is deeply nested into S9y. A conversion to CKE - if that can get integrated easily - should not be that much in core, as a quick search run for 'xinha' is telling. But there are quite some additional plugins which would need to get modified because of that too. But Garvin will surely know better.

I think it is time for a change!
But if you want to do that even before 2.0 you definitely need to hurry up!!! ;-)
Regards,
Ian

Serendipity Styx Edition and additional_plugins @ https://ophian.github.io/ @ https://github.com/ophian
yellowled
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Re: [2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Post by yellowled »

First of all, the issue with the new backend has been resolved, but I still think we should consider moving to CKEditor or Aloha. They just look more suitable for a modern backend.

There's the issue of licensing and size. A standard download of CKE is a 780 KB zip, 2.7 MB uncompressed. They do offer a builder to customize the download, so we could probably save some stuff there. Licenses available are GPL, LGPL or Mozilla – not sure how those work with our BSD license.

Aloha standard license is GPLv2, but they also offer a FOSS license option which explicitly works with a BSD license, see http://aloha-editor.org/license.php. However, the Aloha download is HUGE – 11.7 MB zip, 33.8 MB uncompressed, and I'm not sure that could be shrinked. At least I couldn't find a builder …

Edit: For comparison, our bundled Xinha is about 5MB, so we could even save some space there.

YL
levito
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Re: [2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Post by levito »

Rich text editors are always a pain in the ass to develop. Simple in theory, dirty and ugly in real live. That's what I learned from integrating them in a custom-built CMS.

So, we don't need a super clean and elegant fancy new RTE, but a well-maintained and proven one. CKEditor is a good one, and plain old TinyMCE is okay, too. Aloha is the only new kid which does a lot right, but it's far too heavy and more designed towards inline editing (which the recent CKEditor 4 also can do, TinyMCE does it with a bit of hacking). All other new kids are much nicer on the inside, but they all don't feel right just yet. And the future is unsure. We need something solid.

My vote is for CKEditor, second vote for TinyMCE.

<edit>
Oh, I see... LGPL seems to be no option for s9y. So one promising new kid might be WYSIHTML5: http://xing.github.com/wysihtml5/. MIT license, which should work with BSD (as should MPL, which CKE uses)
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yellowled
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Re: [2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Post by yellowled »

levito wrote:Oh, I see... LGPL seems to be no option for s9y.
Since most of the templates available for s9y are GPL-licensed, I was assuming that we could bundle a GPL-licensed editor as well …? That would work for CKEditor, which also offers a GPL license.

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garvinhicking
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Re: [2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Post by garvinhicking »

Hi!

GPL is not possible for the WYSIWYG editor, we need BSD. While BSD is compatible to GPL, GPL is not compatible to BSD.

Our core must remain untainted, everything contained in our release needs to be BSD licensed.

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Garvin
# Garvin Hicking (s9y Developer)
# Did I help you? Consider making me happy: http://wishes.garv.in/
# or use my PayPal account "paypal {at} supergarv (dot) de"
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yellowled
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Re: [2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Post by yellowled »

garvinhicking wrote:Our core must remain untainted, everything contained in our release needs to be BSD licensed.
Wait, what? Are you saying the BSD license does not allow us to bundle anything which is not BSD licensed as well with the core?!

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garvinhicking
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Re: [2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Post by garvinhicking »

Wait, what? Are you saying the BSD license does not allow us to bundle anything which is not BSD licensed as well with the core?!
Yes, it's always been that way! That's why we often had RSS parsing issues, and our WYSIWYG is one of the only BSD licensed ones.

Our core is completely BSD licensed, only external plugins and external templates are allowed to be GPL.

Regards,
Garvin
# Garvin Hicking (s9y Developer)
# Did I help you? Consider making me happy: http://wishes.garv.in/
# or use my PayPal account "paypal {at} supergarv (dot) de"
# My "other" hobby: http://flickr.garv.in/
yellowled
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Re: [2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Post by yellowled »

garvinhicking wrote:Yes, it's always been that way! That's why we often had RSS parsing issues, and our WYSIWYG is one of the only BSD licensed ones.

Our core is completely BSD licensed, only external plugins and external templates are allowed to be GPL.
Could we switch? Apparently (IANApatentL), there are newer revisions of the BSD license, which are compatible to the GPL – the Revised/New/Modified BSD license and the Simplified BSD license.

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garvinhicking
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Re: [2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Post by garvinhicking »

Hi!

No, we cannot switch.

For one, I do not want to switch and consider this a "hard dependency" for me, and second, we would need to ask each and every contributor ever from s9y to allow changing the license, and also ask any bundled BSD maintainers for their GPL licensing.

IANAL2, tho. :)
# Garvin Hicking (s9y Developer)
# Did I help you? Consider making me happy: http://wishes.garv.in/
# or use my PayPal account "paypal {at} supergarv (dot) de"
# My "other" hobby: http://flickr.garv.in/
yellowled
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Re: [2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Post by yellowled »

So basically we're stuck with a WYSIWYG editor that hasn't been updated in almost 2 years unless we find another WYSIWYG editor which has a BSD license.

By the way, I did find another BSD licensed editor which is even in jQuery, but most of it hasn't been updated in 2 years, either. It's also kind of ugly and rather slow. I sense a pattern there. :twisted:

Not bundling a WYSIWYG editor at all doesn't seem to be a valid option, either.

YL
yellowled
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Re: [2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Post by yellowled »

garvinhicking wrote:Our core is completely BSD licensed, only external plugins and external templates are allowed to be GPL.
I'm sorry I keep harping on about this, and I'm hoping this doesn't turn out to be Pandora's box, but if we can only bundle stuff with the core which is BSD licensed – how come we can bundle jQuery with the core? jQuery is MIT licensed.

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Timbalu
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Re: [2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Post by Timbalu »

Because MIT is somehow (*) "compatible" with BSD, like Garvin said somewhere else (I personally don't know).
[*] in terms of free use
Regards,
Ian

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yellowled
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Re: [2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Post by yellowled »

Okay, now I'm getting into this stuff. :?

As I mentioned before, there are multiple types of the BSD license. The text in docs/LICENSE (which, by the way, probably needs to be updated because it only claims the copyright for 2003-2005) matches the text of the so-called “3-clause BSD license” (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses).

This is also known as the Revised, New or Modified BSD license. According to the Free Software Foundation (see Wikipedia article), this version of the BSD license is compatible with the GPL. But (if I understand all this correctly) add a GPL licensed piece of software to a BSD licensed piece of software would make the combined package GPL licensed. :shock:

As for the MIT license, it is (like BSD) a so-called “permissive” license, meaning that it explicitly allows the inclusion of MIT licensed software in proprietary software. That's (as far as I understand it) why it works with the BSD license.

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Timbalu
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Re: [2.0] New WYSIWYG editor

Post by Timbalu »

Yes, this is how I understand this license questions from far.

In mean for the WYSIWYG-Editor, we could erase the old one completely, change the s9y wysiwyg activation button to check into a small text block to inform the user to install the updated CKEditor via additional Plugins because of license terms on his own, provide a link to do so and keep going. ;-)
Regards,
Ian

Serendipity Styx Edition and additional_plugins @ https://ophian.github.io/ @ https://github.com/ophian
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