OK, sounds like you did a pretty thorough comparison of the two.
Personally I just picked Markdown cause it seemed easier to teach my
clients doing ## than h2. And also a few other things seemed more
simple to learn, and all of the tags that I needed to get done were
doable using Markdown, even definition lists using Markdown Extra http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/extra/
...however that was using Drupal (which has Markdown Extra).
That being said I hate you for converting from Markdown to Textile,
umm... sorry... no filter war. :) No, actually after looking at your
extension I can confirm what I just said in the last mail, that your
extensions are probably reason enough for me to give Textile a try.
(Thanks for the hint on getting 'em installed, I'm a bit of a Radiant
noob.)
cheers, Simon
On Nov 20, 2008, at 18:34 , Jason Garber wrote:
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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