I have a little different take: I really like Markdown for plain text documents that are to be read as plain text and might be converted to HTML, but Textile works better for me when I'm using it as a shortcut to HTML (and it won't be published plain-text). I tried Markdown before I'd ever heard of Textile, but these things got to me:

Links: I find it easier to write "links this way":http:// radiantcms.org rather than [this way](http://radiantcms.org) when you're writing them all day, every day. Guess it's just personal preference. Maybe it's because quotes and a colon are easier to type than square brackets and parentheses?

Numbered lists: I'm a little OCD, so I found myself re-numbering Markdown numbered lists when I added an item in the middle, even though it technically doesn't matter. Textile's use of the number sign is intuitive and saves me trips to the therapist. :-) Textile supports nested lists and, in RedCloth at least, definition lists, but I haven't found a way to do either in Markdown.

Blockquotes: Here again, you only technically need one > at the beginning, but there's plenty of room to be obsessive and spend time fixing hard-wrapped blockquotes.

Code blocks: Yeah right, like I really want to indent every line of my code by four spaces!

Headings: I don't want to have to count how many times I use the pound sign. h4 is less ambiguous than ####, though
#### My heading ####
looks a lot prettier (esp. when the pound signs are balanced!).

Okay, so this is turning into an obsessive-compulsive confession! Now, I don't mean to start a filter war! Just had to defend my choice. I'm glad that Radiant offers both and I wish that I had liked Markdown better than Textile initially because when I started using them a couple years ago, the Ruby Markdown libraries were a lot better than the Textile one!

I'd love to see a toolbar for Markdown. I had dreamed of having the same buttons always be on the toolbar and then the output change depending on the filter currently selected (e.g. h2., ##, or <h2>). Unfortunately, textile_editor is meeting my needs, so I don't have time or motivation to make that happen, but I'd welcome a fork that would!

Jason

On Nov 20, 2008, at 10:21 AM, Simon Rönnqvist wrote:

 Hi!

Personally I feel that Markdown is easier to learn for noobs, and would really have liked to see your extension done with Markdown. However, maybe your toolbar makes the reduces the differences in ease of use between Markdown and Textile.

Maybe even Textile is better in conection to buttons, since you can have a H2-button produce h2.Something, but what would you call a button that produces ##Something? Ok, both could be called the more explanatory "Heading 2", but you get my point... in general the button name could look more like the textile code that it produces, than it could look like to markdown code that's produced... which could ease up the learning process, when learning to actually write the code.

And the rest of your implementation sounds really promising, I'll definitely give it a shot. Thanx! ;)

 cheers, Simon


On Nov 20, 2008, at 15:50 , Jason Garber wrote:

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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