Feature Proposal: Update / Enhance WYSIWYG Editor

Motivation

From an End User Point of View, FosWiki especially with the NatSkin is a user friendly, smooth modern experience. Until... it comes to Topic Editing.

While the WYSIWYG-Editor is an optical break to the otherwise clean UI with its tiny buttons and windows, it is also not so smooth to work with it. Inserting a Table or an Image gives you dialogs with tons of options that most of the users in a non-IT-Company won't (or doesn't take the time to) understand, while things like define a single cell's background color, drag a line to control column width or select and resize an image with a single leftclick are missing.

For many foswiki usecases it is critical that as much people as possible contribute their knowledge, so the Editor is one of the most important UI elements and also is the one where many users spend much time with. If the barrier is high and the look and feel too unmotivative, some people will be left behind.

Description and Documentation

Update TinyMCE, preferably in a way that makes future updates easy, or even check if it's still the best option, given that there are alternatives like ckEdit.

Integrate it further with Foswiki, i.e. it would be great to have a set of dialogs to insert common used macros and their parameters like in an intuitive way without having to know the syntax.

Examples

Demo pages of current versions of TinyMCE, ckEdit, or MediaWiki VisualEditor.

Impact

WhatDoesItAffect:

%WHATDOESITAFFECT%

edit

Implementation

Discussion

Some of this is already underway:

• Upcoming 2.2 will use the latest TinyMCE. Presently 4.7.9
• The 2.2 TinyMCEPlugin is also much easier to update. See Development.TinyMCEPlugin
• MichaelDaum has a new more flexible editor plugin under construction. See Item14288

-- GeorgeClark - 08 Mar 2018

Note that any customisations to TinyMCE (or any other embedded editor) have to be maintained. This is a lot of work, so we have taken the approach of using TinyMCE "out of the box" as far as possible. If you want to extend the embedding, then please, go ahead, but bear in mind that any costomisations have to be maintained - don't expect someone else to do it

-- Main.CrawfordCurrie - 09 Mar 2018 - 13:18

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