[Expo-tech] Remove tinymce dependency - use plain text editing

Fri Jun 12 17:43:07 BST 2020

Thanks for responding to this. Nice to know someone else cares about this sort of thing.

Rob Watson made a mention in favour of Markdown on Slack a month ago, but it was ambiguous which part of “the system” he was talking about or who he thought would use it for what particular purpose.

For “Edit this page” when the page is part of the handbook, then obviously it is already in HTML and no one is going to rewrite 900 pages or so into Markdown – which doesn’t do illustrations and photos very well if at all.

But the number of people who want to edit the handbook who don’t already know HTML seems to have been vanishingly small over the past few years.

Reading between the lines, I think it may be that it is in Cave Descriptions and Cave Entrances that markdown would be useful. Though even here we would want to be able to add photos of entrances etc. 

This is where newish expoers are most likely to want to input new content. 

(And in logbook entries; though handwriting in ink is an established alternative.)

We should perhaps look on the removal of TinyMCE as a temporary measure: while we are restructuring things and moving to python3, a later version of the OS on the server, and (perhaps) to a later version of django (if that is easy, otherwise not).

We can always install another  javascript wysiwyg HTML editor at a later date. It doesn’t require much plumbing and is a fairly self-contained job.

And we should document and promulgate the possibility of writing logbook entries directly into the website using “Edit This Page” during expo. (in :expoweb:/years/<2020>/logbook.html )

Philip

From: Martin Green [mailto:martin.speleo at gmail.com] 
Sent: 12 June 2020 17:28
To: Philip Sargent (Gmail)
Cc: expo-tech at lists.wookware.org
Subject: Re: [Expo-tech] Remove tinymce dependency - use plain text editing

Has anyone checked how many people on expo get scared by html? It may be more than we would assume. Several people have complained about it over the years.

Is it that often that we search for changes to make it actually a

problem?

Cheers, Martin

On Thu, 11 Jun 2020, 17:22 Philip Sargent (Gmail), <philip.sargent at gmail.com> wrote:

OK, 
Wookey & I agree that the wysiwyg HTML editing is more trouble than it is
worth, so we propose to remove the TinyMCE javascript editor from troggle
when we move to python3.

This is only used in the "Edit this page" capability on HTML pages.
(The similar capability to edit .svx files online just uses JQuery and is
not a problem.)

The problem is that TinyMCE insists on reformatting all the HTML so that git
thinks the whole page has been changed when the person editing made only a
one-line change.

We can't find a setting, even in the most recent version of TinyMCE, that
stops this happening. There are settings to add to the default format:{}
setting but none to get rid of it completely that we can find.
If anyone can find this setting, please get in touch asap.

The only real use for it is editing tables, as in the who&when table or the
gear-tape table:
http://expo.survex.com/handbook/geartape.html_edit 

example of the svx editor which we propose to use instead:
http://expo.survex.com/survexfile/caves-1623/107/alcovepop.svx

Philip

-----Original Message-----
From: Wookey [mailto:wookey at wookware.org] 
Sent: 11 June 2020 16:11
To: Philip Sargent (Gmail)
Subject: Re: edit this page - tinymce or plain text

On 2020-06-11 16:03 +0100, Philip Sargent (Gmail) wrote:
> Ideally we would want one that used language-servers to provide syntax 
> colouring.
> 
> The same tinymce editor is NOT used in the online svx editing, e.g.
> http://expo.survex.com/survexfile/caves-1623/264/amalgamation.svx
> which is just jQuery / form.
> 
> So if we used that instead for the HTML pages, we would lose all the 
> HTML-wysiwyg-ness, but at least it wouldn't reformat.
> probably a short-medium term solution ?

Fine by me. The wysiwyg-ness is useful for table-editing (e.g. on
who-and-when pages), (and not scaring away people who've never seen
HTML) but that's about it.

Wookey
--
Principal hats:  Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/

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