Jason, I'm looking forward to installing your extension. I too like
textile (though what drove me to it was the ability to add styles to the
tags that it creates -- don't think markdown can handle that).
That said, I too would like a markdown toolbar. Personally, I'd start
with what Ryan Johnson built over at: http://livepipe.net/control/textarea
But the big thing I'd love to see here is a coordinated effort to create
a common toolbar that different filters plug into. This way it would offer:
* A consistent experience across toolbars (same look, placement, and
intent among buttons). This is also why I thought the filter
selection might, itself, be made part of the toolbar.
* Button(s) to let you add simple Radius tags into the content (so
users don't need to know tags either yet can learn by seeing what
gets inserted).
* Other common buttons (maximize-textarea-to-fit-window anyone?)
-Chris
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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