Wish for usebility

[wh1sper]

I am using the integrated wysiwyg editor htmlarea.
Most of tim I am very satisfied with it.
But sometimes I wish to switch with a simple click to the dump plain texteditor. I do not mean the sourcecode button in the integrated wysiwyg editor, that is my solution for now.
The question is: Is it possible to integrate a button to switch between the both editors?

[garvinhicking]

This cannot be solved with a single click; it would need a HTML reload to the page to temporarily disable the whole WYSIWYG thing, and then another button to enable it again.

This would take a few hours of developing, and it would not be really cool for you, since it cannot be toggled 'on the fly'.

It is a good idea to have something like that. Maybe with some advanced javascript a page reload could be avoided. But we'd have to also pay attention about how other WYSIWYG editors work, they might differently access their element information, but the "disable" button should also work for them.

Regards,
Garvin

[carl_galloway]

The wysiwyg editor has some wonderful features. Most are probably never used by the majority of serendipity users. The vast majority probably only use the wysiwyg editors to change color or font size, perhaps add a short list, and even less often, throw in a small table. A quick tour of a couple hundred user blogs will confirm my view.

Perhaps it is time to look seriously at how users create their posts, at the additional constructs they want, and then begin development of a custom editor that suits serendipity. For example, the color palette. Using htmlarea it is possible to change the color of text. The majority of users simply pick one of the websafe colors, and red seems to be the most popular. Now, from a design perspective, doing so often makes the post look like it doesn't fit with the overall template. Theme designers can style all the standard html elements, but if the user isn't aware of them, or if they use the wysiwyg editor (which overrides these styles), then they won't benefit from the effort of the designer. Adding a color selector to serendipity's text editor, and then allowing the theme designer to specify which colors are placed into the selector, would provide a complimentary palette to the user. Considering how sophisticated serendipity is, this would seem like a very nice addition.

While we're at it, why not add sub-headings and basic list formatting options to the text editor. With headings, we already use h1, h2, h3 and h4 within serendipity, so lets add two additional contructs to the text editor, heading and sub-heading that map to h5 and h6 respectively. Theme designers can then style these appropriately, and the user experience is enhanced without having to resort to the wysiwyg editor.

An extra bonus could be the addition of a simple spell checker to the text editor, and to the comments moderation screen. Sometimes users pound the keyboard and don't realise the mistakes they're making. Comments are especially problematic, and once the submit button is pressed it is too late to correct errors. If the blog owner could check spelling automatically through the moderation screen they would be able to enforce standards. Please don't discount this and reply with a glib response that nobody cares. The plain fact is that many blog owners take their content quite seriously and don't want the integrity of their message to be affected by something that is so highly visible.

[hgoor]

I suggest a poll:

Do you use the WYSIWYG editor for posts or not?

I for one do NOT use it. I think most of the WYSIWYG editors are rubbish and also make it easy to mess up what you're doing.

ps: a spell checker plugin (for instance like WP 3.51 had using Aspell) would be very very welcome. There is one out there but it uses and external site and I hate it).