Feature Proposal: DeKi-alike WYSIWYG

Motivation

Foswiki WYSIWYG is still very immature and unable to provide the easy interface required to %22less techee people%22. %0D%0ADekiWiki provides a more easy to use interface %28wiki for dummies alike and could used as a baseline.

Description and Documentation

Develop+a+better+WYSIWYG+interface+much+like+DekiWiki

Examples

Impact

WhatDoesItAffect:

%WHATDOESITAFFECT%

edit

Implementation

-- Contributors: RuiProcopio - 10 Mar 2009

Discussion

Link? Examples?

-- ArthurClemens - 10 Mar 2009

firstly, wow, I signed up for a deki express, and am pretty instantly told that without javascript enabled, deki, like confluence is useless and broken - Foswiki falls back gracefully in this case. So reluctantly, I turn on javascript...

and get a Wysiwyg editor that looks to me pretty much the same as the TimyMCE one we have - just with a more attractively laid out skin.

Rui - I think you'll need to be more specific about how you feel the Deki edit interface is more user friendly - I agree that its prettier, but it seems to me to have many more buttons and bits.

-- SvenDowideit - 12 Mar 2009

Deki has a few featurettes I quite like; for example, link insertion by navigating to the page you want to link. So it scores a few points in terms of usability, and more in terms of robustness - Rui is right that the Tiny MCE we are using is not as robust as it could be, and is riddled with nasties.

Inspired by this topic I started upgrading the Tiny MCE version in Foswiki to the latest 3.2.2. Unfortunately this requires rewriting the custom Tiny MCE plugins we use, so it'll take a while to get right, but it's already an improvement.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 12 Mar 2009

NatEditPlugin has got a dialog to insert a link to another topic (or an attachment at another topic incl thumbnail previews) using an jquery.autocomplete box. Maybe this can be reused on Tiny MCE as well. Never did a plugin for it.

-- MichaelDaum - 02 Jan 2010

After a couple of months away from TinyMCEUsabilityUpgradePlugin, I am back at it tomorrow. Tonight after studying how firebuglite does it, I wrote a little bit of JS to extract the filename of jquery's javascript src so it can be neatly loaded from TinyMCE's silly pseudo-static .htm iframe dialogues.

And yes, I will be stealing a little bit from the NatEdit link dialogue. Mainly for the attachment stuff

My ambition is to eventually try to pop up some sort of autocomplete on [[ keypress or cursor selection within an existing TML link, but I don't have a clear vision on what the UI would look like for that, and it will be somewhat annoying to implement unless the jquery version of TMCE has some other standard way to generate popups in its plugins other than iframes.

-- PaulHarvey - 02 Jan 2010

I will be happy to think about the UI once you have figured out the constraints.

-- ArthurClemens - 02 Jan 2010