I'm catching up to this interesting thread a couple days late, but I
can't believe no one's mentioned my textile_editor extension yet!
I'm hurt! (jk!) It would have helped if I'd have announced it to the
list when I released it in September, huh? :-)
[ANN] radiant-textile_editor-extension makes Radiant really easy to
use for non-technical content editors!
We have a lot (50-ish?) of technology-impared people working on our
university website. We haven't rolled the CMS out to all of them yet
but so far in my testing I've found that the Textile editor toolbar
helps them a bunch. It seems silly because pushing the H1 button
inserts h1. and pressing B adds asterisks, but it works because it
overcomes their fear and uncertainty about Textile. They pretty
quickly get to the point where it's faster to just type h3. than to
click the button, but for getting over the initial hump of staring at
a blank textbox, it's a huge psychological boost!
The part of the toolbar I find myself using all the time is the link
and image buttons. The way I designed it, not only can you add
Textile links and images, but also enkoded email links, attached
images, and attached files.
Speaking of attachments, the concept is genius for file management.
Buckets and asset libraries and all that are too confusing for my
users (I tried paperclipped for a while), but they're used to
attaching files in webmail, so the page_attachments extension works
out great. I use the page_attachments_xsendfile extension to make
the attached file available at a friendly URL (the page's URL +
filename). That seems to match people's expectations better. You
just tell them they can use an attachment on that page or any page
under it and they get it.
I'm a strong believer in the non-technical user being able to see
what's going on. Even if they can't write <r:children:each> tags,
when they encounter them they'll know what's going on and are less
likely to mess up Radius or HTML tags than if they're hidden behind a
WYSIWYG editor. Training up front is really the key—and preparing
their expectations. So you say, "Textile is going to make your life
a whole lot easier. Here are a few things it does and here's a
toolbar in case you forget. HTML tags [Radius tags in reality] are
mostly for the web team. You're not expected to know how to use
them, but I'm glad to show you a few so you know what they do."
If you're using Textile, make sure you're using version >= 4.0. A
lot of the hate on RedCloth was rooted in how buggy it was for a few
years. You'll need the redcloth4 extension to make it work in
Radiant 0.9.6.
Jason
On Nov 18, 2008, at 3:08 PM, Chris Parrish wrote:
1. I think the textareas need to come with a toolbar above them
(page
parts, snippets, layouts). These toolbars would be filter
specific.
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