Please Vote on the Text Editor
We are big fans of tinymce - the open source text editor that we use on text entry boxes - it lets us all feel that we are using a Word Processor on the web.... which is such a familiar and visual experience...
It's great that we can use and see while we write....
blockquotes....
Bold Text, Italic text...
- Numbered Lists
- Bulleted lists
and so on...
Problem is... It's very sizeable in download... adding lots of javascript to the weight of every page... and possibly causing Internet Explorer to hang...
Trouble is that 95% of our users aren't posting but just browsing... and we don't want them carrying all this weight around while they wander the site.
So what we propose is to make it's use optional... providing a checkbox to decide whether you want to use it or not...
We'd just use a simple text box for normal posting that would make each page load much more simple... using some simple text tags for creating bold or italicised text etc... Markdown is our favoured option... so that you'd create bold text by doing *this* or creating a blockquote like
> this
So I'm just asking the regulars how they'd feel about the choice - we won't take it away but would make it optional for forum & comment posting.
Let us know here with your comments... thanks!
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8 comments
In reply to emptyend (post #7)
I haven't had a single hang (or ever been logged out since the very early days of using the site)....and I use IE7 and Windows (on a PC that is a couple of years old). I don't think some of the assumptions over the hanging issue can be right!
I haven't had a single hang (or ever been logged out since the very early days of using the site)....and I use Firefox and Mac OSX. I don't think some of the assumptions over the hanging issue can be right!
:-)
S'pedia people: My gut-feel would be that many newbies and potential converts would echo the comment from xigris. This is potentially one of your differentiators.
SW10
....err....maybe I'm missing something here but instead of automatically presenting every page with a "post a comment" box already displayed at the bottom of the list of posts, why don't you just make the "post a comment"simply a button that brings up the box and text editor only when someone wants to post a comment?
I'm sure even regular posters like me won't mind one more click if the box can be brought up quickly enough!
ee
ps....I repeat - I haven't had a single hang (or ever been logged out since the very early days of using the site)....and I use IE7 and Windows (on a PC that is a couple of years old). I don't think some of the assumptions over the hanging issue can be right!
I like tinymce. It's one of the factors that's encouraged me to post here. TMF is a pain in the bum in comparison. I'm not techy, so seeing a button to press to make things bold etc is great
Must say, I've not noticed any huge problems in load times either with Firefox 3.5.3 at home, IE7 at work or Safari on the move.
Xig
In reply to doverbeach (post #1)
> If you go for thsi, you are going to have to provide clearer instructions!!!! Is it really better than html tags that we are all used to from TMF?
AFAICS Markdown simply provides a shorthand for those kind of HTML tags, so instead of using <bold> and </bold> to get emphasis, you would instead use *and* which then translates it to <bold> and </bold> for you. (Or, for this system <em> and </em> or <strong> and </strong>)
Having consistently said that you should 'add more lightness' I'm now going to say that from a simple usability perspective, I think it would be a shame to lose the current system. It's one of the S'pedia differentiators at the moment. However, I recognize that you need to balance different elements of user experience to get the approach which attracts and maintains most users.
Nevertheless, not being particularly techy in this area, it does surprise me that an editor describing itself as "Lightweight" (that's because, er, the PHP/.NET/JSP/Coldfusion GZip compressor makes TinyMCE 75% smaller and a lot faster to load don't you know) should be causing these kind of problems. Wouldn't thst mean that other sites are having similar problems? What's their experience? Why are they persevering? Or there a combination of factors at work on S'pedia which causes the problem?
SW10
theres a very good cheat sheat here
you are going to have to provide a MASSIVELY simpler cheat sheet than that! Strip out all the unlikely to ever be used stuff (poetry formatting!) and concetrate on the everyday. Something like
Q How do I put text into bold?
A You put ** at the start and end of the word/passage. So typing **blah** gives blah
Q How do I put text into italics?
A You put an underscore at the start and end of the word/passage. So typing _blah_ gives blah
Q How do I put text into one of those fancy quote boxes?
A You put > at the start of the text
nb using any of this really means that you should provide a 'preview' facility.
Markdown keeps html tags intact, but allows you to format text using simple human readable markup... theres a very good cheat sheat here - http://warpedvisions.org/projects/markdown-cheat-sheet/
It's certainly easier to use than BBCode, and many people can't understand HTML.
Marben. re. Memory - I think you may be right on that... !
I love tinymce & haven't observed any major problems using it (I'm on I.E.8 now). I consider it a big plus cf competitors' sites. The checkbox idea sounds fine. On observation: whilst my main computer is pretty old, I have upgraded it with loads of RAM (2.5Gb). It may be that many of the porblems are observed on low-memory systems. I'll also observe that I DID see many more crashes in S'pedia 1.0 with I.E. 7 IIRC (one of my reasons for sticking with I.E. 8) - all just FYI and FWIW.
If tinymce is causing the IE problems, then it has to go! But if it can be kept as an option for people with suitable systems, that would be great.
Where is this checkbox going to be? I would suggest on the user's profile or in the View Options box. So people can have a default.
I couldn't follow the Markdown page - too many glasses of wine probably. If you go for thsi, you are going to have to provide clearer instructions!!!! Is it really better than html tags that we are all used to from TMF?