Posted by tounano@drupal.org on December 16, 2006 at 2:05pm
Hi,
I am interested about your favorite way to post your forum topics/comments.
I'll classify it into 3 categories:
1. The way it done in Drupal/IPB, simple text area maybe with BB Code/Html
2. The way it done in vBulletin. Cool plain text editor, with user friendly BB Code/Smileys buttons and wysiwyg option.
3. Using advanced wysiwyg editors like TinyMCE or FCKEditor
Link to fckeditor demo:
http://www.fckeditor.net/demo/
Link to TinyMCE demo:
http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/example_full.php?example=true
Which of the wysiwyg editors you like more? TinyMCE or FckEditor?
I think my favorite way is like it done in vBulletin, but what's your favorite option? What will fit best the DruBB project?
Have a nice day.
Comments
I say wysiwyg.
I say wysiwyg.
BBCode was kind of a band-aid solution for disabling raw HTML access while still allowing people to create links and such. Drupal can already limit users to a certain 'safe' subset of HTML. Plus it saves the server-side load of having to parse the BBCode into HTML.
As for which wysiwyg editor, I like TinyMCE or HTMLArea/Xinha. FCK always rubbed me the wrong way, it feels like its main goal was to emulate MS Office's look & feel, rather than being a good editor for websites.
Between TinyMCE and Xinha, I could be happy with either, although IMHO neither is quite perfect in its current form. One thing I'd like to see is client-side parsing of text smilies. If they click the wysiwyg editor's smilies, it puts an
<img>tag in the post. So if it's possible, why not convert:)into an<img>tag on the client side so the server doesn't have to? I posted this on the websites of both Xinha and TinyMCE, but never got an answer. Secondly, I'm not entirely satisfied with either's options for posting/linking images. I posted about it at http://drupal.org/node/89170it would be nice to have
it would be nice to have wysiwyg but its not light weight and more people are used to BBCode.
So default as BBCode with BBcode/smiley tool bar and optional wysiwyg may be a better choice.
As long as you're running a
As long as you're running a 'light' profile and not some crazy Word/Dreamweaver-replacement setting, Xinha and TinyMCE both load in quite reasonable times. A bit larger for the admin to download, but who cares?
And as for more people being used to BBCode, I'd have to call BS. There are far, far more people out there who think "click the B button to get bold text" than there are people who think "put [b] at the start and [/b] at the end to get bold text". And it's far less intimidating to those who aren't already forum veterans. Just because BBCode is common on forums doesn't mean that it's actually the best solution for them.
I've found that some of the
I've found that some of the WYSIWYG editors (such as FCK and Tiny) both hook the "standard" MS Office shortcut keys - Highlight text, press CTRL-B, and lo, your text is bold.
I like BBCode, but lately I see it used in conjunction with something that looks a bit like a Windows "toolbar" - see phpBB for example. BBCode is inserted by means of icons above the text editing area. You don't actually NEED to know BBCode to use it.
You could easily replace the BBCode and buttons in a standard phpBB setup with a stripped down FCK or TinyMCE, and no one would notice.
I really like having as close to the "real thing" on my forums that I use. I was stuck on FCK for a long time (a lot of my sites still use it), but for the legwork to install TInyMCE in Drupal 4.7, it's a fantastic editor. Nothing quite beats having a spellcheck that doesn't depend on the browser version (FF 2.0 with it's inline spell check) or having some ActiveX control enabled (ieSpell I think?). That's a function that BBCode lacks ;-)
On the flip side of all this, the forums that I run are for a WoW guild site. The GM knows no HTML, and when he asks how to create a link, I try to tell him to click the "chain link" icon in TinyMCE. He's then presented with a window where a lot of the options and fields don't mean anything to him. I realize that it's not the "best" solution either - it adds a bit of complexity as well. I've setup a TinyMCE filter to run the post through 'urlfilter' just so that its not such a pain to create a link to another page.
My rambling $0.02 :P
Lightened fck/tinymce
Late to post here, but I'm new to Drupal.
I agree re doubts many people know BB code, but instead are used to buttons. (And that most regular folk would barely touch code tags as drupal now offers; I don't faff with them unless feel real need.)
Even before seeing this thread, occurred to me Drupal's html filters coupled with wysiwyg could be v useful here.
Can have basic set of buttons, for things much as typical with BB code, in customised version of fckeditor or tinymce (could even allow admins and major contributors to have access to full editor, which they'd be used to as also deal with stories etc).
I prefer fckeditor, but that's in fair part as haven't got tinymce working in Drupal (5).
A drawback, tho: doesn't work in Safari; I have to use w Firefox.
While scribbling here, also looked at DruBB page, notice there's idea for Drupal-native BB. That would seem good way to go. Maybe, too, could go some way towards wysiwyg editor for Drupal, at least for the main stuff people might want.
(Easy for me to say; I'm no coder, tho could stand on sidelines, cheering.)
Favaorite way to post
My favorite way to post anything on Drupal sites is Texy! syntax. (http://drupal.org/project/texy)
I am not againts some wysiwyg editors, but it will be good if administrator will have choice to select which of Drupal input filters can be used.
Option #2
For some sites TinyMCE and FCKeditor may be an overkill. A simple Text area with something like http://drupal.org/project/quicktags as the default install with options to use more advanced editors.
Quicktags may not be enough but it works well for people who is less than net-savvy.
I always disable rich text
I always disable rich text editors... but I may be the minority. ;)
I love just a plain text box... but every now and then I use the smileys buttons if I can't remember the code for it.
Honestly, I'd say most of
Honestly, I'd say most of those who prefer plain text boxes are geeks. And if you're thinking of geeks first, then that's most likely how everyone else is going to perceive your software: a toy for geeks.
Not that I'm not a geek myself, of course. But I've come to prefer wysiwyg editors under one condition: that I don't feel like they're slowing me down. One big factor here is keyboard shortcuts. A smooth and fast WYSIWYG for the average joe should come first, but care should be taken to ensure that all features (or at least as many as possible) are usable without reaching for the mouse.
And of course, as you noted, there's no reason we can't allow people to disable the rich editor. :)
I'd definitely steer away
I'd definitely steer away from the TinyMCE editor style of doing things. A plain text area with BBCode and Smiley bars would be my preference - so the vBB way of doing things :)
+1 to this. Regular forum
+1 to this. Regular forum users get very used to bbcode syntax, and as a default option it's a lot lighter.
What would be useful is being able to have different editing options for different node types - so quicktags for forums, tinymce for something else, plain text for something else, smiley buttons and bbcode for forums, bbcode only for something else - all those different combinations.
and as a default option it's
A bit heavier on the browser side (IMHO negligible, if you're using a light configuration of TinyMCE), but remember that it's heavier on the server side to translate BBCode into HTML. I'd rather just have in HTML in the first place.
There's a difference between how I'd post and my users want
I have launched a Drupal based site that's meant to replace a site that had used the invision power board system. The people are accustomed to BBCODE and buttons to help them build their BBCODE tags. They're also accustomed to the flatforum style with the postings and comments arranged in date-order rather than the comments being arranged by which comment they're a reply to.
Anyway.. for editing .. they keep asking me to provide buttons for entering BBCODE. The site is on drupal 5rc1 and it is the quickeys module that provides those buttons, but that module hasn't yet been ported to drupal 5.
As for myself, I'm happy with the #1 style that you described.
However between fckeditor or tinymce I've got a huge vote against fckeditor. Say you have a site full of postings where the "line break converter" was enabled and you have thousands of postings which used it. They all have blank lines to mark paragraphs, not the <p> or <br> tags. The problem is that fckeditor doesn't recognize the blank lines as paragraph separators, and runs the paragraphs together. This makes it impossible to use fckeditor on such a site.
I don't know what tinymce does with this .. because tinymce hasn't been brought to drupal 5 yet.
As a vBulletin user myself,
As a vBulletin user myself, I like their method. They might not have the most in-depth WYSIWYG editor out there, but it makes it very easy for users to post what they want. TinyMCE is detailed, but might be too much so for some users, and they don't give much of a middle ground.
TinyMCE is detailed, but
Did you try any of the configurations besides the 'full' one linked in the original post? TinyMCE can be used in a fairly minimal configuration, too.
Really, we should probably have some discussion of what buttons we do/don't want enabled by default, whether wysiwyg or bbcode is used.
Would it be possible to use
Would it be possible to use both? I don't think TinyMCE supports Quoting, and there're a few other bbcodes that my users rather like.
TinyMCE supports citation
TinyMCE supports the citation tag
<cite>see : http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/example_full.php?example=true on the last line of iconsand also the
<blockquote>that is actually used for indenting the text. with the right css rules, it can be nicely set up as a quotation.Indeed, and it's also the
Indeed, and it's also the most semantically-correct way of doing it. :)
We should use an already existing forum engine
Sorry to post here that as it is off topic, but there are a lot of forum engines already, we just need to develope a bridge for one of them. To develope and maintain a full featured forum engine is a big task, why we don't just leave that task for them and use their product? If Drupal's core makes this easier and if there will be a nice documention about the process, a lot of people could write a bridge for his "one and only" forum. For me that would be SMF. I used earlier PHPBB, but now SMF is THE FORUM for me. I haven't tried to connect the two system yet, so if this is easy enough now, I am happy to hear that. I know there is an alpha SMF Drupal bridge called embient, but its developer seems to disappeared :-( I haven't checked deeply that bridge myself yet. I have a forum site that uses SMF and I would like to extend it to a portal with Drupal in the near future. So, I need a bridge between them. So, in my opinion if we make efforts to make more easier to make bridges for Drupal, we will get more benefit in the long term from this. Do you know what will happen if Drupal can be use for all the forums? The other CMSs will be forgotten and everybody going to use Drupal :-)
The demand for a better forum solution in Drupal is getting more urgent. A lot of people want to use Drupal but they dont like the core forum. If there are enough experienced people to make a new forum for Drupal, making easier to make bridges will not be a problem.
There will be always (at least) a problem with an integrated forum engine. There will be always people who will not like it. In my opinion a forum is stand alone system not just a small module mainly to say we have a forum too. Please dont be insulted, I just try to express my thoughs about that. I think people like freedom. If they can use whatever forum they want to use with Drupal, that would be the ultimate solution for Drupal's forum problem. I read a lot of review with the sentence Drupal is great as a CMS or CMF but the builtin forum is not so featurefull as the system's other part. Why we want to rival with other teams, especially if they are leading in the forums' area?
In the begin maybe we should take out the forum from the core and distribute as a module. If this is enough for a site, it is available to use. If not, it should be easy to connect Drupal to a external forum system. I dont know Drupal's internal enough yet, so I dont know if this is easier than make a new forum engine. I think it is more easier and as I wrote in the long term the benefits will be huge. Sorry for the long and off topic post, but I would like to know your opinion about that.
1) We open ourselves to up
1) We open ourselves to up every security hole in a product we don't directly control, and will always have patches later than they do.
2) Drupal's forum never advances beyond the shortcomings of the forum that's integrated into it. The existing forum options are great in a lot of ways, but they still have some shortcomings that can be summed up with "that's the way it is because that's the way it's always been with forums like this." See my feelings on BBCode below for one example.
3) Nor does it do anything to promote Drupal as a distinct 'brand' (for lack of a better word). Drupal gets stuck with being 'a vB/phpBB/IPB/SMF/whatever forum with some other pages added on' rather than being 'a Drupal site'.
3) There's two types of bridges: bridges that work, and bridges that work well. A bridge that works is trivial to create. A bridge that works well is not. If all you want is a bridge that 'works', then just setup all your scripts to authenticate against an LDAP server or something, and be happy. I haven't researched it lately, but I'd bet there's already a way to do this with both Drupal and SMF. Your users will have to login twice depending on where they're at on the site, but you've got the basics of integration. But what if you don't want your user to have to login once for the Drupal side of your site, and again for the SMF side of the site? What if you don't want to have to deal with two totally separate admin interfaces? What if you want your site to have a consistent look & feel no matter where you're at? What if you don't want to put up with having two totally different theming systems, or (shudder) have one system embedded within the other? What if you want your comments for front page articles to be the same as posts to your forum? What if you want to share your user groups or admin privileges with the rest of the site? What if you want to promote a forum topic into a front page article, or use it as any other node or taxonomy type on your site? Sure, with a hack hack here and a hack hack there, you could build it. But it would be far more work than you probably think, and even then you would still probably end up with a lot of absolutely terrible code (and that's not even counting the quality of the code you're trying to integrate into Drupal).
On the other hand, you could put all that effort into making Drupal a world-class forum system in its own right.
Thank you for your comment.
Thank you for your comment. Im getting to understand the motivations and -what is more important to me- agree with them :-)
I will be here to see where can I help with the Drupal's forum project.
Ideal if forum part of Drupal
I've a couple of Joomla sites running forums, and one of the attractions of Drupal to me is that the forum is built-in - even tho it's a bit, err, naff (! - yes, I know, should sort flatforum etc etc, but even then, some problems).
So I think great to see ideas for stronger forum in Drupal; hope there is progress (sorry, I'm not coder).
Indeed true re having content that fits within the site. Can be searched. Can be mixed n merged with other content (already, with tiny site, I can see forum posts plus stories being listed for certain taxonomy terms: a cinch with Drupal, but maybe not if forum is embedded, or partially blended [if that's about the right word]).
URLs work well, too. So too site maps, google maps.
I think a strong, built in forum could be killer app for Drupal.
Agreed. It's great to have a
Agreed. It's great to have a strong native forum system for Drupal 7.
Re: 1) We open ourselves up
The first and third concern I see, and I imagine those problems could be worked out. The second concern:
I don't see that concern. If the only point of a forum in Drupal is to enhance the "brand" of Drupal, then the forum isn't really the point, the "brand" is. Programming for brand is in my opinion meaningless and abstract - programming for functionality and usability should be the main concern. People stick with what functions well, not what seems in the abstract to be appealing - where when you look under the hood it's not so hot (because it was programmed for the wrong reasons).
I've searched through drupal's forums and groups and seen a lot of comments from people who don't like Drupal's forums, and far prefer 3rd party forums, and they make requests for functionality to intergrate with them. I haven't seen a single one of these requests seriously responded to in development directly related to Drupal. Hello. This is something that people really want. If that desire were met, people would be more attracted to Drupal.
I don't believe people would say Drupal would be a "whatever" with "some other pages added on". Ironically, that sentiment now applies to Drupal for different reasons - a lot of comments are to the effect of "Drupal is great, with a sort of forum added in that I don't really like." The idea that Drupal integrated with other forums would be seen as "some other pages added on" ignores the many accolades people give for forums which have nothing to do with Drupal. Rather, I believe people would say that Drupal is great, plus it works well with other forums!
I agree with arguments that other forums are so great because they are a heavily focused, specialized application devoted singularly to the idea of a forum. So in short, refusing to capitalize on that only for concerns that Drupal is not of itself greater than those forums - frankly, I find that simply and amazingly absurd. And to be very general, I think programs that work well with other programs - instead of trying (and failing) to be a standalone answer-all - that is attractive to people.
As I said at first, surely the problems of integrating 3rd party forums could be worked out. It's only a question of whether Drupal programmers want to program what people want ;)
You refer to the prophecy of the pastry that will bring balance to the Force. And you believe it's this.. donut?
You refer to the prophecy of the pastry that will bring balance to the Force. And you believe it's this.. donut?
vBB
I like the balance that vBB has.