Rich Text Editor for Drupal -- Needs Review

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Monyet's picture

Content Management System (CMS) such as Drupal is very useful for many people in the sense that is reliable and easy to manage. However, Drupal currently does not provide a rich text editor for the users for writing contents.

For Google Summer of Code 2008, I would like to develop an AJAX rich text editor for the Drupal distribution that would allow users to easily write content without having to worry about HTML. The text editor should allow the user to add links to the specified word, insert images, codes, quotes, and general document formatting.

Additional properties of links and images should be specified by the additional dialog box. The users should still be able to choose code editor as their text editor. The user should also be able to resize the writing space without having to do a page refresh.

Why is this beneficial:
- Users don't neccessarily have to bother with HTML
- Drupal will become more user friendly
- Efficient content editor

Comments

er, no.

jpetso's picture

-2 for bad research.

http://drupal.org/project/tinymce
http://drupal.org/project/fckeditor
http://drupal.org/project/htmlarea
http://drupal.org/project/nicedit
http://drupal.org/project/widgeditor
http://drupal.org/project/whizzywig
http://drupal.org/project/wymeditor
http://drupal.org/project/wysiwygpro
http://drupal.org/project/xstandard
http://drupal.org/project/yui_editor
http://drupal.org/project/bbcode_wysiwyg

No need for yet another rich text editor. Rather than that, we need a way to hook them up properly with Drupal core and standardize stuff, but that's also being taken care of by Gábor Hojtsy already. If a student can not even find one single rich text editor of the numerous available - let alone figure out the real problems and possible approaches to solving them - then I seriously doubt the skills to successfully finish a useful Summer of Code project.

Let's be nice. Grady seems

tonyn's picture

Let's be nice. Grady seems like a pretty cool guy.

Considering this is a pretty big task, maybe Gábor or someone could mentor a project finding ways to solve problems listed in the battle plan. Gábor is a great coder, sure, he could probably accomplish this himself -- but let's look at one of the things google SOC bring us, a student who is more experienced in a particular area of drupal. Someone could walk in not knowing much and walk out a guru in the area. More brains for your buck!

I do not believe that Grady's inexact assumption that he had to make his own editor means he isn't familiar with the current ones.

I agree...

webchick's picture

I appreciate that jpetso is basically trying to state, "In an open source community, it's considered rude to not do your research ahead of time, and for SoC in particular, you want to make sure that you demonstrate that you understand the problem you're trying to solve." This is good advice.

However, let's remember that everyone has to start somewhere, and be a little more diplomatic in our replies, hm? ;)

Ok

jpetso's picture

Sorry, I'll try harder next time. Didn't mean to offend, and it's easy to overdo negative wording when a student wants to do a Drupal SoC project apparently without having had the personal need for solving this problem (if that were the case, Monyet would certainly have discovered those editors before posting this proposal).

I understand that people can't be expected to know everything upfront, and neither want to discourage contributions. So... maybe just throw up a testing Drupal and check out the one or the other existing solution. It might accommodate your needs, and if it doesn't then maybe you can find out where it needs more work, and come up with a plan how it might possibly be solved.

Basically, I'm a bit angry with myself for letting emotions succeed over politeness... please accept my apologies.

I assume you mean for Drupal core itself...

webchick's picture

This is one of the "big 11" features to make a killer Drupal 7 release. However, your proposal would be better off if you first researched some of the existing efforts in this area, and talked about how you plan to address some of the challenges that have already been identified by other people in this space.

Ok

cwgordon7's picture

Ok, could you please state what would make your proposed rich text editor better than existing ones? Would it use jQuery? Would it be standards compliant?

What is your level of experience with javascript/jQuery?

Why write one yourself, instead of integrating with an existing one like jwysiwyg?

Drupal 7 WYSIWYG

RobLoach's picture

This is one of the battle plans for Drupal 7, stated by Dries in his State of Drupal presentation at Drupalcon this year.

Aaron Winborn and Oleg Terenchuk talked a bit about it in Boston. Have a quick read through that to get your brainstorming started (Gábor also made a great post). It would be neat if the editor's features were created based on what was fed in by the input formats. Could you explain more about how your system would work?

Oleg Terenchuk (litwol) and I will volunteer to co-mentor this project if it gets approved. Of course, Gábor gets dibs if he wants it.

needs elaboration

Gábor Hojtsy's picture

I agree this needs rethinking and elaboration. Writing an RTE is a highly complex task, and the suckiness of the existing options is a testament in itself that whole teams can fail in that. There is a definite lack of decent Javascript experience in the Drupal community (myself included), so it would be good to know more about your plans. How would your RTE be Ajax for example? This statement looks quite surprising to me.

There is another editor (module)

GiorgosK's picture

that still has no working release
http://drupal.org/project/editor
but aspires to be a Drupal Specifig Editor

Might want to take a look at it as well
or talk to its maintainer

MarkItUp!

RobLoach's picture

MarkItUp! in a modular jQuery plugin that allows you to change textareas into powerful markup editors.

WYSIWYG API

José San Martin@'s picture

Perhaps a good path would be a WYSIWYG API.
It would be a base for people writing their own WYSIWYG-Drupal integrations.

This API would:
- Administer editor profiles (as TinyMCE module does)
- Calculate necessary buttons according to the input formats (as Gábor suggested)
- Allow modules to expand editors if necessary (for instance, an extra button for media handling)
- Allow automatic (AJAX) node preview in an extra tab

How many time do we still have to think about the project requirements?