Kunena 3.0.4 released

Discussion on about WYSIWYG editing is a very big subject. It is a huge subject, in fact. We have many other topics relating to people's desire for a WYSIWYG editor for Kunena.

In terms of what currently exists for the immediate future: there are no plans at this time to include [what most people commonly refer to as] WYSIWYG (i.e. TinyMCE or some other plugin) editing features as part of the core component of Kunena.

There will be no new features added to K 3.0; any future releases of K 3.0 will be confined to bugfixes.

The feature set for K 3.1 has also been defined; WYSIWYG editing features are not part of the design specification for K 3.1.

I know this topic is coming up on two months old, but these comments:

I do think it is unfair and incorrect to say most forums have a WYSIWYG editor.

and

We really like hearing all your suggestions

leads me to add my comments.

We are in the process of migrating from an old forums software package that my community has been using for nearly 10 years. It is running on ASP 3.0 (a late-90s tecnology). When I told them we were migrating to something "new and fresh" and promised features only avaialble in "updated technology", they were excited. The lack of a wysiwyg editor has caused an uproar, and is outshadowing every "new" feature that this Joomla!/Kunena/CB solution provides. It's like trading in your 1975 Ford Pinto for a 2014 New Soemthingorother, but not getting a radio or power windows. For them, it's unfathomable to think that "current standards" and "no wysiwyg" can be used in the same sentence.

coder4life says, "incorrect to say most forums have a WYSIWYG editor".

This chart indicates that it's about a 2:1 ratio of popular forums using some sort of wysiwyg as compared to forums who do NOT use some sort of wysiwyg.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Inte...um_software#Features

Anyway... please add my vote to the list of those requesting a wysiwyg editor for posting in the Kunena forums. Even if it's just a simple tinyMCE plugin, which (from my long ago dev days) seems to be the easiest way to go about it.

please add new IFRAME code in next version of Kunena! Because FLASH code, people not can see flash videos on mobile phones!!!

NEW CODE (no flash):
OLD CODE (flash video), now no one use it:

Thank you! Now I can understand the problems behind the WYSIWYG editor implementation in Kunena. You have to understand us, the "users" we are not devs, we just using the softwares. Before your post, I tought (and I think not only me) it is enough to put TinyMCE under the Kunena and done. Now I know it is a bit more difficult. :laugh:

Thank you again for your time what you spent to wite your post, and answer my question. I think we need more posts like your to understand what's behind this project.

Happy new year!

Hello positivnrg,

I think you are misinterpreting Sozzled post as being aggressive. I think he is trying to understand your reasoning and point of view by providing us with some examples.


As for WYSIWYG editors and the reason why we do not have one in Kunena is a much debated topic among our team. However there are facts about why we have yet to put resources into coming up with a complete solution that I will detail below.

In designing a WYSIWYG editor we have long investigated the principles of security (access, injection), format storage (bbcode vs html vs wiki vs markdown), performance (up to millions of posts), feature specific content (spoilers, hidden text, configuration report). Taking these parts into consideration we have a wide range of challenges not normally investigated in less complex forum solutions, especially those that are not directly integrating with an Open Source CMS.

We receive common questions about why WYSIWYG is not included. We had to ask ourselves several questions weighing different methods of reasoning to many of our members suggestions, recommendations, and perspective of reasoning.

Why not use Joomla editor system?

• We are not sure if the content, without some custom work and very close inspection of the Joomla codebase, if the submitted format and its contents are safe to submit, execute and store.
• The editors are usually only used by a specific set of people in your Joomla installation, and as such pose less of a security risk if something malicious were to occur. (Taking an example from Joomla fresh installations visitors do not have access to editor tools, only those [Authors, Editors, ect.] designated by ACL)
• Security issues that occur in features used by Kunena in Joomla (for example an undesired outcome of safety checks about what is being submitted) will make your Kunena installation vulnerable.
• Editors can be installed and uninstalled at the site administrator discretion, editors may not remain consistent during the lifespan of a website, as such can create inconsistency in the storage content.
• Multiple editors can be used that use different types of storage format as well as custom parsing and output display.
• Editors with different parsing methods requires us to take in consideration the possibility that multiple formats could be used per post, parsing occurs for those different formats creating performance issues with pages with hundreds of posts. (One editor can use BBCode, another could use HTML, and a third might use Wiki Syntax)
• Some features may remain absent in different editors.
• We need to handle a situation when an upgrade occurs and the format has to be modified, or changed to a new format.

Why not use a BBCode only solution?

• Does not address the ability to use Joomla functionality of multiple editors.
• Still requires us to implement all of Kunena's custom BBCode.
• Requires us to support a proper parsing scheme.
• Requires us to support across multiple browsers (this is a reason why most WYSIWYG editors still have not provided a 100% successful implementation, suffer from weird oddities, and require many hours of maintenance overhead).

I do think it is unfair and incorrect to say most forums have a WYSIWYG editor. Doing a quick search myself I see most free solutions have the same BBCode insert structure we have now. Sure there are exceptions, but to my knowledge few support a large complex WYSIWYG implementation to deal with many of the problems detailed above. I also see some provide their own solutions, but as a result disregard general reasoning about portability and customizations in regards to the wider context of how Joomla can be used. Most WYSIWYG implementations I find are part of commercial based forums that have to consider a specific set of security considerations, one storage format, and one area of performance considerations due to the one storage format.

This is not to say we do not want a WYSIWYG editor working with Kunena. On the contrary we see it as a valuable asset to making discussions move in a way people feel they should be expressed. It specifically improves having to imagine what the destination visual format is going to look like. As a designer at Kunena this is a high priority of mine that I have been investigating over the last several months. Specifically I have been looking into how we can improve the interactions using Kunena software.

Our team has discussed the various angles to the problems detailed above. We have some pretty good ideas in how to solve them, but like everything we do here we have to take careful consideration into the wider perspectives of Kunena software and priorities. We at Kunena are focused on having a solid communication platform using a forum based discussion structure.

We really like hearing all your suggestions, and we are working towards making Kunena the best it can be. We want to make sure we approach the issues behind WYSIWYG in a smart way, with the needed resources to maintain it.

Hmm I don't know why you think I was wrote about J! forum extensions. BUT when we talking about J! extensions just look arround! The Kunena is a J! exension. Of course it is the best extension when we talking about the forum type extensions of J!.

...

And, when we talking about the forums, (in this case I talking about the forum solutions J! based or not, it doesn't matter) I think 99% of them using WYSIWYG editors. So I think it is not a really "extra".

You think about Kunena as J! extension (and it is true) but for most of the "fans" it is THE FORUM SOLUTION!

Sorry if I too complicated in this post, Im too tired.

PS.: Why you are so aggressive / ironic? I just asked a question. Lot of your posts are negatives. :dry:

positivnrg wrote: Every forum, component etc works with WYSIWYG.

Thank you for the feedback. We are working on a WYSIWYG editor for future version of Kunena. I do not know when this WYSIWYG editor feature will be available but, as a guess, possibly as early as middle-to-late 2014.

As a matter of interest, can you provide us with the names of two forum extensions developed for J! 3.2 that use a WYSIWYG editor? Are these forum extensions commercial or non-commericial? I searched but I was not able to find any.

Hmm. WYSIWYG editing is a minimum requiments now... Every forum, component etc works with WYSIWYG. And you guys want to put in the buyable package? :dry:

Please delete all "Flash" embed-codes!

Now only Iframe embed-codes used in web!

NEW YOUTUBE CODE(no flash, only iframe):

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/asdasdasd123?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>

OLD YOUTUBE CODE (with flash):

<object width="560" height="315"><param name="movie" value="//www.youtube.com/v/abcdef123?version=3&amp;hl=ru_RU&amp;rel=0">