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Bring back the 3.1 standard editor as an option


insectdude

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Only telling you the way it is... If you're not happy, don't use it - it's as simple as.



In the short term, that may work. In the long term however it's a completely different story. When people no longer continue making skins, hooks etc. supported by the earlier versions, or when IPS decides to no longer support the older version.

So in the long term that way of thinking is not very good... Besides, you and your users may be exited about upgrading because of 10 other improvements, not realizing before it's "too late" that it came with one major flaw...
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There's a recipe for progress, right there.



"Hey, Ugg, see this raw mammoth meat we're eating. What if we used that new fire thing and . . . "


"Shut up. If you don't like raw mammoth meat, go and eat grass."



... Farber, Matt, All.... the #1 complaint... from everybody and their dog.
BBcode Buttons in Simple.
Do That, and at least 80% of complaints on this editor would instantly be silenced.
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There's a recipe for progress, right there.



"Hey, Ugg, see this raw mammoth meat we're eating. What if we used that new fire thing and . . . "


"Shut up. If you don't like raw mammoth meat, go and eat grass."




:laugh: you sir made my day
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It was short sighted of Invision to not include the option for the old editor.



Sometimes I wonder whether they think about their customers who have huge boards over the customers who do this as a part time hobby with a 5-10 member base.



Seriously, a decision like that could ruin someone's online income.



Here comes the "you didnt have to upgrade brigade"



Oh man...This right here ^^^

If there is one thing I hate about IP is their 'upgrade or get left behind attitude'. I requested help to solve a problem with gallery 3. The response I got was basically a quick flick: "Yeah we fixed it, but you're going to have to upgrade to gallery 4 if you want it". Thanks for nothing IP. This bug was causing many comments to show HTML. I hate gallery 4... however I couldn't let the gallery to be filled of html code and my members were complain about seeing it. So I did upgrade... yeah it fixed the problem but I don't like the new gallery and it took sometime before members stopped complaining about the change. I regret upgrading the gallery, I should have just used an image upload extension.

And now this editor upgrade... very disappointed that they have not supplied any means of switching off the new editor to use the old(don't bother saying there is a switch icon, I know about it... I wrote this reply with the new editor switched off. It is hardly functional compared to the old.). Don't get me wrong, I'm not a IP hater (I like the software over many others). But you haven't exactly been impressing me since 3.1 and gallery 3.

PLEASE IP! Listen to your customers and provide alternate options for those not interested in opting-in to upgrades like this. Just because your wish to move in a direction doesn't mean your customers do. You need to involve your customers in the decisions you make. I'm afraid if IP keeps doing this in the future... I will no longer be a customer(but then, it's not like you guys really care if one person leaves... as long as your bank balances look good eh?).

Man I even had to switch it back to write this reply because the editor wasn't showing the IBeam and wouldn't do returns.

And don't say 'you didn't have to upgrade' because IP IS practically forcing you to. They won't provide good support to people running old versions(they simply tell you to upgrade) and if you want your board to stay up-to-date with security... you have to upgrade. I don't care if IP replies to this, all I would like is for this to be least acknowledged from my perspective.
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Personally, I'm not holding my breath on the issue of buttons in simple mode - if CKEditor doesn't have them, their developers must also have looked at doing it and decided not to for some reason. I'd suspect the same reasons will stop IP doing it, and that if it is possible, the degree of enthusiasm for spending time coding a hack to a third-party application which was adopted to save time is going to be limited. I'd hope I'm wrong, but 'investigate' and 'indeterminate' makes me think I'm not going to be, and that requests for changes to CKE would be better directed to CKE.

It would be beneficial if changes like this, and the reasons for them, could be flagged up for us admins before the fact so we can give our users a heads-up, or at least not look bewildered when we get asked about them. I just reviewed the two blog posts on the new text editor - at no point (unless it's hidden in a video) does IP say 'And oh, by the way, the simple mode will actually now have less functionality, because . . .'

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I really hope you're wrong. And I really hope IPS, in the future, will put things like this, up to discussion, and really listen to the feedback they get from both small and large forum owners.

As it is now there's simply too much things that get broken in the RTE. Copying text for example, it gives the intended spacing in the simple mode, not in RTE. And no spacing at all for me. Switching between modes when writing posts can also be fatal aswell, since it appearantly doesn't like it when you're writing one post in RTE and another in simple mode. Then the post written with RTE will be get lot of html in it. Imagine if this were to happend with a member that just updated something minor in a huge FAQ-post? They suddenly will have to update it again to remove html and manually insert formatting again. Not something that gives you happy members willing to contribute :smile:

And buttons missing in RTE... They should be there.

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If only I could get the buttons back, then I would use this. It wouldn't be possible to make a mod for the editor to add buttons that insert tags would it?



My guess is it is possible, but it's not the easiest thing to code and/or it's not optimal to implement given the editor's current design (or this probably would have been a feature already).
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Your best bet might be looking at the CKEditor site, to be honest - 'buttons off' in source / simple mode is default for CKE, it's not like IP made a change that we can now reverse. But CKE is very much a rich text editor - WYSIWYG is what they do. Any other mode is always going to be the poor cousin.

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Your best bet might be looking at the CKEditor site, to be honest - 'buttons off' in source / simple mode is default for CKE, it's not like IP made a change that we can now reverse. But CKE is very much a rich text editor - WYSIWYG is what they do. Any other mode is always going to be the poor cousin.



The RTE has issues of its own, to the extent that many people still prefer the STE.
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I just want to display my concern about this once more. I've done some counting in the members-table and checking what editor is most used. With that said the default editor is the STD, but I did it on members that've visited us in 2011 (last visit -column) and only those who have atleast 500 posts in forums where we increment the post count (posts -column)

11.9% (447) of those users use the RTE.. That means 88.1% (3762) of our active members base still use the STD and expect there to be buttons in simple mode aswell. With the amount of problems I've experienced with the RTE on these forums already I don't expect our members to be particularly happy either...

I also did the counting with the WHERE = 2011 on the last_activity -column. (Not completely sure about the difference on last_visit and last_activity) and then I got 11.6%.

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I have to admit that I enjoyed the BBCODE version of the post box. But, I've noticed that when you select the BBCODE version by clicking the metal grey box icon in the upper left hand corner of the "formatting" menu, that it tends to block every feature out by "graying-out" every formatting feature so that you have to manually type in the BBCODE. Saying that this is annoying is understating the obvious.

I'm just not sure why it was necessary to code the "format feature" of the text menu so that the "format buttons" are only usable when you have the WYSIWYG editor turned on.

I'm not saying that I've encountered bugs or glitches, because I haven't discovered them, but it's very odd that IPS would have the forum software coded so that when you turn off the WYSIWYG editor, that the software grays out all of the features. It's like having to create an HTML page from scratch when all you're doing is trying to post a message. When you turn off the WYSIWYG editor, the "format buttons" should not gray out during the process.

This isn't a critique or a complaint, it's just an inquiry as to why it's created this way. It should be easier to use the post box, not favor one feature over the other. It just seems that when you turn off the WYSI editor that the forum software seems to take the "I don't like you so get out" attitude when you turn WYSI off.

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I have to admit that I enjoyed the BBCODE version of the post box. But, I've noticed that when you select the BBCODE version by clicking the metal grey box icon in the upper left hand corner of the "formatting" menu, that it tends to block every feature out by "graying-out" every formatting feature so that you have to manually type in the BBCODE. Saying that this is annoying is understating the obvious.



Dude welcome to six weeks ago. What have we been complaining about this whole time? Lol
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  • Management

Yeah, it has the ability but it's a fair bit of work. We have actually discussed this internally quite a bit and it's something we want to do. Right now our priority is to stabilise IP.Board and its apps before we look at adding new functionality.

So, we hear you and we agree that buttons on the STD editor would be nice. It's more of a case of 'when' than 'if'.

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Yeah, it has the ability but it's a fair bit of work. We have actually discussed this internally quite a bit and it's something we want to do. Right now our priority is to stabilise IP.Board and its apps before we look at adding new functionality.


It's not new functionality though is it? Buttons to insert BBCode in the standard editor have been a feature since the earliest versions of IPB.

I return to the points I made in the first post in this thread. One of the major motivations for switching to CKEditor was that maintaining your own in-house RTE took too much time and effort. But now you are saying that adding back the most basic functionality to the standard editor is "a fair bit of work". Surely it would be much less work to simply integrate the standard 3.1 editor into 3.2 and give us the option to choose which to use?

You already have a standard editor that is proven and your customers were happy with. Why spend so much development time trying to customise CKEditor to mimic this functionality? As well as defeating the original point of making the switch, isn't such heavy customisation likely to cause you problems when upgrading to new versions of CKE in the future?

Having said all that, I do appreciate that you plan to add the BBCode buttons back to the standard editor one way or another. I just hope we don't have to wait for IPB 3.3 for it to happen.
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Before IP.Board 3.2, we had an editor (WYSIWYG) that we coded in-house. It was becoming outdated, and difficult to maintain, due to constant changes in browsers and technological advancements (HTML5, etc.).

With 3.2, we switched to CKEditor, a WYSIWYG plugin developed externally that is now integrated in IP.Board. CKEditor does not have a 'bbcode' mode available that we can easily utilize, so this will require new development.


I can appreciate from a customer perspective "you used to have x and now you don't" so it's not "new" development, but the reality is, adding this feature will require someone to sit down and code it all out, so it is new from a development perspective.

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Indeed. It's a fair bit of work actually. You essentially have to write a new 'mode' for CKEditor and then write all the getSelection methods as CKEditor doesn't have anything built in for the source mode like that.

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Before IP.Board 3.2, we had an editor (WYSIWYG) that we coded in-house. It was becoming outdated, and difficult to maintain, due to constant changes in browsers and technological advancements (HTML5, etc.).


Yep, I get that. But the 3.1 WYSIWYG/RTE editor was a standalone thing. You had to enable it in your settings, you couldn't switch between the two modes like you can with CKE. That means the standard 3.1 editor was also standalone.

What I am suggesting is restoring the option to select which editor we want to use. Except, instead of the options being the standard pre-3.2 BBCode editor and IPS's in-house RTE, they would now be the standard pre-3.2 BBCode editor and CKEditor.

With 3.2, we switched to CKEditor, a WYSIWYG plugin developed externally that is now integrated in IP.Board. CKEditor does not have a 'bbcode' mode available that we can easily utilize, so this will require new development.



Indeed. It's a fair bit of work actually. You essentially have to write a new 'mode' for CKEditor and then write all the getSelection methods as CKEditor doesn't have anything built in for the source mode like that.


I understand - but that work seems unnecessary, at least in the short term. Allow us to pick to use the old editor instead of CKEditor and I suspect almost all the complaints about the new editor's standard mode would go away. And presumably that would take minimal development time to implement (at least in comparison to building a whole new "mode" for CKEditor), as the functionality to select which editor to use already existed in 3.1.

I appreciate that I don't have all the information, but I really see no downside to re-integrating the 3.1 standard editor. You wouldn't have to continue to maintain your in-house RTE because that would not be available - those wanting an RTE mode would select to use CKEditor. And you don't have to invest the time in writing the new "mode" for CKEditor, which would itself likely become a hassle to maintain.

It seems you adopted CKEditor to escape the difficulty of maintaining your own RTE, but are now proposing to build your own BBCode editor mode into CKE which you would then have to maintain on an ongoing basis. Surely it's the same problem but in reverse. I'm trying to save you the unnecessary work, and decrease the time us customers have to wait until we have a fully-functional standard editor again. Just re-integrate the editor you already have rather than trying to build the BBCode button functionality into CKEditor.
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