New editor approaches

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I’ve invited to open up a new dedicated thread for the discussion on new editor approaches as I didn’t want to see the announcement of my own editor plugin, StudioEditor, buried by out-of-the-scope, out of the topic comments, that are perfectly welcome and necessary but kind of annoying if you simply want things focused on the topic exposed. Nobody felt the need to do so, - to open up a new topic -, but there’s something important to communicate because the more editors available, the better for GRAV. Any editor has to inscribe itself into the default.yaml substituting the editor options available by default in GRAV, CodeMirror and an enriched textarea…

As I’m inviting the community to develop more editor alternatives here’s a basic information about blueprint inheritance probably known to insiders and vital to implement alternative editors:

Vital for Editor Developpers

Once the appetizer of this thread is communicated, I’ve been looking into the GRAV 2.0 roadmap discussion… additional editors, including WYSIWYG, or improvements on existing is a repeating topic as it was in the out of topic discussion on StudioEditor.

With the introduction done, get yourself into it, working on editors, and discuss here :slight_smile:

Post Scriptum: the availability of hooks can do harm sometimes. Hooks need incredibly good documentation, especially about when not to use them…

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Have a look at Milkdown, that’s a nice approach. Playground is incredible. Took me a minute to find this one. There are things out there, much better than StudioEditor or NextGen Editor. The challenge is to implement this. Why not a community effort? Put your hands on it. For me it’s surprising that there’s been no community effort to solve a problem that’s many years old…

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A list of what I want to see in a an editor for GRAV:

  • WYSIWYG Markdown Editor
  • What you see based on current theme, very important
  • Dual panel editor option with constant sync both ways and the possibility to minimize either, source markdown and editable preview and maximization of the editor view of the other
  • sync scroll of both views
  • Build into Admin or available with admin without any extra cost, it’s a CMS you can charge for a lot of extra features but when it comes to editing itself, it’s core, it’s audience, it’s satisfaction
  • Allowing multiple editor instances in blueprints which would allow theme authors to attach great editing experience not only for main content but also for more complex and structured site layouts
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Having been around for a while, I’m not surprised.

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(BTW why is everyone capitalising GRAV lately?)

I’m trying to think of a good place to put these where we can up- downvote them individually…

FWIW my list when I was hacking up a couple of my own:

  • a good extensibility framework to support customisations per site
  • add or remove toolbar buttons/widgets
  • upload images directly which also adds them as page media
  • check image metafiles for default alt/title/caption to populate, which can be overridden per embed
  • drag images from page media OR a toolbar with names and thumbnails of available media (basically an easy way to embed existing images)
  • intelligent selection actions following cursor: e.g. edit a link or an image embed
  • gallery and lightbox tools (maybe achieved by integrating with shortcodes)
  • ability to add classes to some elements, ideally a selection of classes available in CSS (probably difficult!)
  • ability to choose whether to use relative, site-relative, or absolute URLs for links and images
  • customisable miniature dropdown forms to embed structures like product references or maps.

Not too much! :wink:

I implemented some of these with varying success in my past attempts. I will see if I can set up a demo or post some screenies.

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