To be fair to TinyMCE,
I'm not entirely finished with my integration.
The Asset management (both images and URL's) portion isn't finished yet.
Initially, the approach I'm taking is to make a slight modification
to the UploadAsset.java to create the lists (both image and url/link
are stored as javascript array in text files) in the appropriate
resources sub-directory (the UploadAsset class will parse and append
an existing list).
For images, the editor will look for the respective image list inside
the node's resources folder and display the results accordingly.
An image list file looks like this
"
var tinyMCEImageList = new Array(
// Name, URL
["Logo 1", "example_data/logo.jpg"],
["Logo 2 Over", "example_data/logo_over.jpg"]
);
"
This way, Asset management is handled by Lenya's built-in mechanism.
At the moment, files are still uploaded through the assets tab within
Lenya site-management, but I'm hoping to leverage the existing Asset
management XSL files and use them directly from inside TinyMCE.
The other major piece remaining in the image integration is similar
to Bob Harner's work on FCK Integration. TinyMCE will create images
as <img> tags, not <object> tags. I'm looking at Bob's initial code
on doing that conversion on Open/Exit editor.
Regarding how TinyMCE will handle internal URL's, that's another
story entirely. It maintains a javascript-based url-list similar to
the image-list, but having Lenya maintain that means will be
redundant to having a sitetree.xml. If only I could get it to somehow
parse Sitetree.xml.. I've found a js based XML parser that I haven't
used yet (http://xmljs.sourceforge.net/); does anybody have any
experience with one?
I'm also looking closely at Bob's work on FCK and node/document
browsing for URL's. So far, his work here looks quite inspiring and
I'm wondering how difficult it would be to rip it out from FCK and
extend TinyMCE.
For those of you who might be wondering why we're doing all this work
with TinyMCE, you should take a look at their demo (http://
tinymce.moxiecode.com/example_full.php?example=true). It's a very
slick Editor, with a clean code base that's easy to configure (http://
tinymce.moxiecode.com/tinymce/docs/reference_configuration.html),
great features, and functions quite well for the average user (where
Kupu and BXE have sloppy quirks).
I'll report on my experience as we get further. FYI, Derek Cooper is
my "average user" tester and has an entire department ready to test
this system for us. He'll probably report more on the user
experiences of our Lenya pilot.
-Tim
On 16-Feb-06, at 7:03 PM, Derek Cooper wrote:
On 16-Feb-06, at 4:45 PM, Renaud Richardet wrote:
From my stand-point, the big hurdles in our project has been
dealing with the editors. TinyMCE is the 4th one we're testing.
That's where everything gets tripped-up, cause ultimately,
that's the interface we'll be presenting the users, few of which
should know much about HTML / XML. Lenya rocks otherwise.
That's very interesting. Would you mind sharing with the list your
experiences with the editors you have been testing?
Ok, here goes.
We started with the two regulars, BitFlux and Kupu. Neither of
which made the cut cause they aren't really going to be usable by
the average individual - we're talking normal staff positions in a
department.
We then started testing FCK, which has a terrific interface and
great features, including:
1) copy from Word
2) copy to plain text
3) URL linking is very slick
Testing was going great with FCK, until we started running into
problems. They started with unordered lists and anchors. Adding an
anchor resulted in very strange behaviour - the anchors got added
multiple times within a document, and an additional rect was added
to the anchor comment. We couldn't recover from this problem and
felt it was a major problem with the code as written. A quick look
at the code made it clear to us that editing it would have been a
nightmare given the way it was written.
We also found that the code validation in FCK wasn't effective - a
page edited in FCK, then edited in source resulted in numerous code
problems, resulting in validation failures.
Next, we had issues with assets - after creating an asset, there
doesn't appear to be a way to edit the title if you've made a
mistake other than deleting the asset and adding it again. Kludgy.
Next, adding assets, like PDFs, and then linking to them from
within FCK results in them staying in the /authoring tree after
publishing, so they won't be accessible. How are we supposed to add
downloadable assets that will be moved to the /live section? This
could have been a Lenya issue though.
Our last problem occurred with Undo - it doesn't work (neither
keyboard shortcut or cute little undo button in nav), WinXP Firefox
1.5.0.1. Not good, as you can appreciate.
Our next client was TinyMCE. Very similar to FCK, but the code is
much cleaner and we didn't have the same problems as we experienced
with our FCK testing. Some of the things we're grappling with at
the moment:
1) Asset management isn't nearly as slick as FCK. You can add an
asset, but it doesn't appear in the asset list when adding images
(probably works if you buy the optional plug-in)
2) URL linking is really lacking when compared to FCK. Basically,
you have to know the URL before editing the page. FCK really has
this aspect nailed.
We're continuing our evaluation of TinyMCE and we'll see what we
determine. In the end, we have to be able to let loose our staff
people who aren't HTML'ers and need to really have that aspect of
the site abstracted. TinyMCE is close - a few more days of testing
and we'll know if we can tweak the code to our liking.
Does this help?
Derek
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