Loved WYSIWYG BBCode editor

At the moment I have a demonstration sandbox 'play' page where I will let people test it to see if it 'looks' OK when I am happy with it. I will post a link here in a day or two.

I have figured out how to implement it into Kunena already. The problem is that CKEditor has a bbcode plugin that is vastly different to Kunena bbcode. So, I have written a new kunena bbcode plugin. That is done.

I have used other CKEditor plugins that already exist, and I may have to write one or two more for all the functions to work correctly.

And then I will figure out the smallest footprint build of CKEditor that will work (the download feature of CKEditor allows you to customise the build).

Thank you for keeping us informed of your progress. Perhaps this narrative will put the topic WYSIWYG editor for Kunena: How to allow HTML tags? into a better perspective and why it was never as "easy" as a lot of people may have expected.

sozzled wrote: Thank you for keeping us informed of your progress. Perhaps this narrative will put the topic WYSIWYG editor for Kunena: How to allow HTML tags? into a better perspective and why it was never as "easy" as a lot of people may have expected.

Hi sozzled.

Indeed, I think that most users will simple expect to replace the reply textarea with a WYSIWYG editor. This is not possible.

The reason is that WYSIWYG editors for web pages use HTML tags to format the text (this in itself is problematic, because users are more familiar with using Word. Word also uses tags to format the text, but it does so in different ways that cannot be done using HTML tags).

So, we have a user familiar with using Word. Underneath Word are style tags. The behaviour of these a user understands, as they can see the results on screen. Then we give them a WYSIWYG editor on a web page, and that uses HMTL tags underneath. They do not always behave like Word tags, and so the user can be caught out by unexpected behaviour of these formatting tags. They see this on screen, and so can edit what they have done to fix the problem they can see.

BUT ... you CANNOT use HTML tags in a Bulletin Board post. Because naughty people use HTML tags to inject hacker code to your server; so the first thing a Bulletin Board does with HTML tagged posting is to strip all the tags.

So, Bulletin Boards use BBCode. These look a bit like HMTL tags, but there are only a few and what they do is limited. Enough for Bulletin Boards, but no good for normal word processing.

What the folks asking for WYSIWYG feature on Kunena are asking for is an inline HTML editor that looks and feels much like a simple version of Word, that makes HTML tagged code, and so looks pretty, but somehow when the user presses the submit button, it all magically converts to BBCode.

This is a very difficult task and would take a long time to do. So, the hack is to keep the reply textarea in its normal place, and programmatically overlay this with a WYSIWYG editor so that the real textarea is hidden. As the user types in the visible WYSIWYG editor area, the code automatically types into the hidden BBCode textarea with the correct tags.

Doing this is hard. If all Bulletin Boards used the same BBCode, then it would be a lot easier, but every Bulletin Board seems to use different BBCode. So you can't simply use a WYSIWYG editor from another Bulletin Board.

That is what makes this so difficult.

Hi,

How can the likes of Vbulletin and so on use a editor just fine and safely.

I am not fused about all the HTML code but a simple bb code editor that outputs it visually would be amazing to have.

Regards

alexdevine wrote: Hi,

How can the likes of Vbulletin and so on use a editor just fine and safely.

I am not fused about all the HTML code but a simple bb code editor that outputs it visually would be amazing to have.

Regards

They can because someone has paid the VBulletin devs to do the work, or, like me, a user has volunteered their time to do it for free. Kunena is free and the core is developed for free. But we all know nothing in life is really free. Much as you might like to think otherwise, the devs at Kunena have to earn money to live, and doing unpaid development work for something that is not ESSENTIAL is not a priority.

Now, I intend to use Kunena, and whilst I can donate, I prefer to contribute my skills in this way. Simples. It makes for a happy world. I will start flexing my coding fingers in about an hour or two, when I have finished doing my (paid) day job.

Hi,

Thank you for the heads up, its a shame the Kunena devs don't put this somewhere to be seen by the community.

So, happily coding right now. There are 17 different Kunena BBCode tags, plus smilies. I have coded and tested 9:

bold
italics
underline
strikethrough
text size
font color
code
unordered list
ordered list

Text size required me to also code an extra button called 'remove format'.

I have coded but not tested:

subscript *
superscript *
quote *
quote with citation *
spoiler *
hide
horizontal rule *
confidential
smilies *

hide and confidential are not coded yet, but are similar to quote, so shouldn't take long.

Hi,

This is amazing news, i take it this will all be safe to use, correct?

Yes, it will be safe in that the forum page never sees the html code. It only ever sees bbcode. The plugin strips any unwanted HTML code out.

I can make it work in Kunena 3.0.5. I will provide instructions on how to install it.

I will also submit it as a plugin to the SKEditor team, who may choose to offer it on their site as a download (the advantage is that it gets updated along with SKEditor changes that way), and maybe, if the Kunena devs like it, they can roll it into Kunena 3.1

Hi,

This is amazing, i cannot wait to try it, i would also consider adding it to the JED!

If you need any testers i am available on Skype if required.

Regards
Alex