Loved WYSIWYG BBCode editor

Is it possible to make this work with Kunena 3.0.3/3.0.4? I'm not having any success. Thanks, looks like a great hack!

Hello,
Is there an update on this?

or...

when/how will I know when a wysiwig editor is available from Kunena for the forum?

Cheers,
G

Hi All

I too was looking for something like this. Based on some initial hacking around, I should be able to hack sceditor into Kunena 3.0.5. Time permitting, maybe tomorrow? Who knows?

I have been working on the BB Code version, yes?


Trevor

That would be great Nelmes.
Keep us posted as it doesn't look like the Kunena Team will be implementing this.

I have the system setup to give it a go tomorrow.

Here's hoping. I have yet to face a challenge I can't cope with.

OK

Need a bit of feedback before I pull the Kunena code apart. For now I am looking at just hacking this, but ideally it would be a plugin with setup in the admin panel.

You have 2 ways of replying to a topic, Quick Reply and Reply.

Quick reply inserts (in effect) a form with a textbox for the title and a textarea for the reply.

Reply gives a new page, with a form inside of which is a two column table with five rows. One cell is the textarea, another cell has the Boardcode/BBCode tools. Quote does the same, but with the whole of the previous message included as a quote.

SCEditor (without much hacking of the js) gives you the option only to replace the text area with a combined BBCode tools and textarea. So, to use this on the full Reply option, means deleting the row with the old Boardcode/BBCode tools, and the message row now has both the textarea and the BBCode tools. Maybe better to re-label the row to Reply (Enlarge/Shrink)?

What do you think? Comparisons shown as image.

OK

So today I have been messing around with various ideas and decided I might do this with CK Editor, and not SCEditor. The reasons are many, but CK Editor is far more configurable, and already has a version as a Joomla plugin, although I am unsure yet whether that, which is the HTML output version, can be modified to add the BBCode plugin. The advantage of this is ...

If you go edit your profile in Kunena, you will see Global Settings ... Editor. The editors that appear there are those installed in Joomla, but currently Kunena ignores them (as it should because they are HTML output editors. But, with CK Editor, it is possible to switch it to BBCode mode.

This method leaves it up to the site owner to install the plugin, and the user to select the editor in their Profile.

I have some playing around to do ...

[Edit: I can see that the Joomla version does indeed include the BB Code pluign, and that there is a custom configuration panel in the Advanced Settings, one switch of which is to use the BB Code plugin. More playing around needed.]

Well, enough looking at that for the day. Joomla allows each logged in (registered front end user to set the default html editor, timezone and language that they want to use). Kunena allows the logged in user to edit these, but they have no effect on the editor in forum posting.

What Joomla could really do with doing is to make it explicit that an editor is an html editor, and have the user select the one they want to use, and also to have bbcode editors, with another field in the user table, to allow the use to also choose there.

But, it does not. And to code that would be a big change, I suspect.

So, for now, back to hacking the Kunena posting files.

Hi All

I thought I would update you on where I have gotten to. I feel like I have pulled the Kunena parse code model to bits and reassembled it in my head. It will need time to settle in.

The bad news. Any WYSIWYG editor for Kunena will have to be just that - Kunena specific. Most textarea replacement editors don't support BBCode, instead they are html. The reason is simple, there is no BBCode standard. Fortunately, the good folks at Kunena have published their version of BBCode, so I can work to that.

CKEditor is the way to go. It has a lot of plugins that do most of what is needed, but not quite all, and not quite the right way. It has a BBCode plugin, but what it outputs is not Kunena BBCode, and there are significant differences. One of the bonkers things I came across was, as an example.

Before you start typing, you select font size 2, type a bit, and then font size 4, and then back to default (font size 3). Most editors will nest all these, and they work in percentages. Say size 2 is 75%, Size 4 is 125% and the default is 95%. You would expect to be back at 95%, yes? Wrong. You would be at 75% x 125% x 95%, which is 89%. Once you switch on a font size in one of these bbcode editors, switching it off (back to default) is very hard. But, for some html elements you WILL want to nest them, for example make text bold, then a bit bold and underlined, and then back to bold and the normal again.

The only way this can be done that works FOR Kunena is to make a plugin for Kunena. Luckily, the API for CKEditor is public, so over the next few days I will start to write this. You will just have to sit back and wait, or say, don't bother Trevor, it isn't worth it.

Hi there,

I do hope you successfully implement this

Looking forward to updates.