General Editor Problems

[rj]

The default editor I find problematic in that for me, it does not replace old code with new code, it just puts more code on top of that last code. This causes all sorts of problems.

I tried Tiny and it wouldnt take, and then when I went back to FKCer it wouldnt work.
I did a page view of the tiny address and it was ridiculous. It went into 5 tiny sub directors to end at TAR.zip.php

I could live with the default editor if it were not so darn flakey and I could add and remove options.

I have noticed that users get overwhlemed by the pletoria of options. They like seeing five...

Heck, all you need is SOURCE, LINK, GRAPHIC and bold and italic.
Keeps the BLog looking good with out all sorts of crazy people doing all sorts of crazy formating.

RJ

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Sadly I can't really understand what's going on:

The default editor I find problematic in that for me, it does not replace old code with new code, it just puts more code on top of that last code. This causes all sorts of problems.

What code? HTML-Code? Can you give an example?

I tried Tiny and it wouldnt take, and then when I went back to FKCer it wouldnt work.
I did a page view of the tiny address and it was ridiculous. It went into 5 tiny sub directors to end at TAR.zip.php

Page view of the tiny address? What do you mean? The release file has many files? What's with tar.zip.php? Did you download the proper release file and extracted it with a proper utility like 7-Zip?

I could live with the default editor if it were not so darn flakey and I could add and remove options.

What kind of options do you mean? HTML-Sourcecode?

Heck, all you need is SOURCE, LINK, GRAPHIC and bold and italic.
Keeps the BLog looking good with out all sorts of crazy people doing all sorts of crazy formating.

The default editor component does have an Interface to add/remove options. Someone experienced with the editor or javascript just needs to have a look at that and build a plugin for that, it should be easy.

I myself hate WYSIWYG-Editors, I'm happy to have gotten that beast into s9y at all

Best regards,
Garvin

[rj]

Tiny and FCKer. When I go to the edit screen of Serendipity and hit FF page source (NOT VIEW I find the path and it goes on and on and on. Six levels deep from your events folder, it should go ONE.
It cannot be correct. I uninstalled both so I cant get at examples right now.

FTPing tiny the other day, you know thousand of files at once, screwed up my CUTE FTP so bad I had to go get another program. Could be bad FTPing. But I redid it in the new one. This seems to be a universal problem with so many thousands of files in this blog stuff, how best to FTP it? Are there options in the FTP program to set to keep it from getting overwhelmed?


My first problem with the default editor is line returns. It uses <p> and doesnt recognize it in preview or after publish. I have to go in after every paragraph, erase all the <p>s that dont do anything and add a <br /> to get a blank line.

I also find when I make something like say BOLD and then decide to change it, the old BOLD is still there in the source screen. Same with ahrefs and scrs. I delete a link and put another one in the same place and I have two links. FCKer did not have either of those problems.

Heres the deal Garvin. About six months of experience out on the blog street I found that how a successful blog works (non tech) is that one needs about half a dozen ENTRY people who upload often. People happening in will leave comments but not entries. Registration and time and effort keep them from participating that deeply.

So I have to find an editor that is simple enough for the six people I need to smooch in, and good enough for me to do what I want on a daily basis.
All six people I have in mind are not tech enough to handle 50 options. It overwhelms such people to see so much up there. And NO WAY can any of them work from SOURCE.

What I want is them to be able to take their article from WORD or wherever they write, paste it as plain text into NOTEPAD, copy and then paste it into the WYSIWYG in the editor. From there they can style and create links and add images. Not one of them knows what a <p> is.

I am presently overhauling the blog, and cant move on until I settle this editor problem once and for all.


RJ

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Tiny and FCKer. When I go to the edit screen of Serendipity and hit FF page source (NOT VIEW I find the path and it goes on and on and on. Six levels deep from your events folder, it should go ONE.
It cannot be correct. I uninstalled both so I cant get at examples right now.

That's could be correct! A path like /serendipity/plugins/serendipity_event_tinymce/tinymce/scripts/js/tinymce.js or something like that is absolutely correct. Or do you mean something else?

FTPing tiny the other day, you know thousand of files at once, screwed up my CUTE FTP so bad I had to go get another program. Could be bad FTPing. But I redid it in the new one. This seems to be a universal problem with so many thousands of files in this blog stuff, how best to FTP it? Are there options in the FTP program to set to keep it from getting overwhelmed?

Thousands of files? The tinymce ZIP tarball from http://belnet.dl.sourceforge.net/source ... _2_1_0.tgz contains 581 files... What do you mean with "screw up"? What exactly happens? Do you get error messages, does the programm suddenyl quit, does it get inaccessible? There are so many possibilities that you need to fully describe them to us, so that we can see how we can be of help to you

My first problem with the default editor is line returns. It uses <p> and doesnt recognize it in preview or after publish. I have to go in after every paragraph, erase all the <p>s that dont do anything and add a <br /> to get a blank line.

Ah! This can simply be a CSS problem.

Many themes set the margins of <p> elements to 0px to prevent some problems with image alignment within <p> elements.

If you edit your style.css file and add

Code: Select all

.serendipity_entry p {
 margin-bottom: 10px !important;
}

for example, this will enforce the proper spacing of <p> elements.

I also find when I make something like say BOLD and then decide to change it, the old BOLD is still there in the source screen. Same with ahrefs and scrs. I delete a link and put another one in the same place and I have two links. FCKer did not have either of those problems.

You might need to first select your text and uncheck the "bold" attribute, before you add any other formattings! Same applies to links, before you add new ones, you might need to remove them?

So I have to find an editor that is simple enough for the six people I need to smooch in, and good enough for me to do what I want on a daily basis.
All six people I have in mind are not tech enough to handle 50 options. It overwhelms such people to see so much up there. And NO WAY can any of them work from SOURCE.

I see that, I fully understand the need for people and WYSIWYG editors. That's why I tried to create plugins for virtually every WYSIWYG tool. You should be able to ask anyone of the developers of those WYWIYG-Tools like FCKEditor or TinyMCE to ask them how to remove options from their editors.

Sadly htmlarea now is outdated and no longer supported, but there must be a way to restrict options.

In htmlarea, you can edit the htmlarea.js file for example and read the documentation inside the file and the reference.html, there are notices of how you can configure the option "btnList" to indicate which WYSIWYG-elements should be shown.

I'd love to do that for you, but my time is limited and I can't really dig into this specific issue because it's beyond my personal scope. Most "dummy" users I've gotten to work with in the past were happy enough if I told them "those 3 are the important buttons. You don't need to use the others. If you want to, that's fine, but you don'T need them to do what you want".

Maybe someone else here is an avid WYSIWYG-user and can jump in to tell how to achieve customizing htmlarea. If you go to their discussion forums though, you might also find instructions there...this is very specific to the editors themselves, and serendipity simply uses them...


HTH,
Garvin

[rj]

Many themes set the margins of <p> elements to 0px to prevent some problems with image alignment within <p> elements.

If you edit your style.css file and add

Code:

.serendipity_entry p {
margin-bottom: 10px !important;
}

--------
So let me see if I understand. the editor is what it is. But .serendipity_entry will change the editor options BETWEEN the editor and the preview/ publish?

Does the default editor have a name?

With a blog, the editor is probably the most important part. Sure would be nice to be able to have some sort of menu or a designated block of text to edit to add CSS and add or remove options. SURE WOULD!

But I understand from the programers point of view its all about integrating a database onto the net. And keeping thousands and thousands of things from going wrong.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

So let me see if I understand. the editor is what it is. But .serendipity_entry will change the editor options BETWEEN the editor and the preview/ publish?

The .serendipity_entry CSS code will affect the preview and display of the entry you write in the frontend, yes.

It's simply a matter of some themes that set the <p> margins differently. Some themes show it as you want to have it, but some theme developers thought that margins should be different.

Does the default editor have a name?

Yes, it's called "htmlarea".

With a blog, the editor is probably the most important part. Sure would be nice to be able to have some sort of menu or a designated block of text to edit to add CSS and add or remove options. SURE WOULD!

We believe in file editing via FTP and good editors. Online-editing has no syntax highlighting and generally sucks. Since you need FTP to operate Serendipity on your server, there should be no problem in editing those files locally and uploading them. This greatly reduces the risk of editors screwing around with CSS files, security issues and bad character encoding through the browser.

But I believe in that you say the editor is an important part, yes. Sadly, coding-wise it'S something different than what's going on in Serendipity's Core. The editor is much more integrated into the browser, while Serendipity itself is more server-side, and that's where at least my personal skills are...

Best regards,
Garvin

[rj]

There are two kinds of editors!
The one where you work your CSS files and the one where YOU AND USERS produce content for Serendipidy.
The CSS editor I have finally figured out. I got a NEW AND BETTER FTP program and now I use DREAMWEAVER to edit and upload by hand rather than letting DM do it as I am never sure what it is doing.

The content editor is what either makes or breaks a blog regards people making ENTRIES for you. If it comes up and is too overwhelming they leave. If they try it and find they have to hit the CODE button to make corrections they leave.

The test of a content editor is doing your NUGGETS in it, filled with all sorts of styles and JS and ads and what have you. We learn its problems quick.

I suppose with nuggets people use DM or FP or something and then just paste the code into the code window of the editor?

The problem I find with HTMLarea is that it very often puts knew style code in on top of old code rather than replacing it. If I have trouble with this users will too.