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:
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
Post Scriptum: the availability of hooks can do harm sometimes. Hooks need incredibly good documentation, especially about when not to use them…
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…
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
Quite happy with the progress… still some miles to go to make a typesafe, vue-based advanced editor…
It’s not so much about WYSIWYG, it’s about in-line, in-context object editing, that’s the real challenge… Contents may and will mix objects: images, math, diagrams, tables… no solution, not even WORD or PAGES are WYSIWYG in all of these contexts… We can rely on pure text for math formulas or diagram instructions but we want to be as WYSIWYG for many other things, even for basic table editing or code blocks… to implement easy and straight-forward editing for different types of content chunks… distraction free editing… more with less editing…
Probably this month I will publish an editor project based on remark, unified, etc. on github. Once it’s on github it does not mean that it’s ready for release to the wild, i18n integration, GRAV plugin and configuration support and a lot more won’t be available out of the box. What will work, a basic setup with Commonmark, GFM and some GRAVFM (Grav flavoured markdown :-)) in a side by side WYSIWYG and a Codemirror Markdown instance… Markdown will never allow for a full-fledged WYSIWYG-editor but there are ways to make editing much more user friendly.
support for tables with basic table editing features
slash fast edit actions to add content chunks, e.g. image, link, math, diagram, code blocks
special emojis slash tool
handy inline text format tool for bold, italic, link, underline, strikethrough
nice inline handling tool for links and images
(you can find many of those in the react example, but not all, I’ve added some new stuff, integration but as a little challenge I wanted to port most of these things to vue to learn things about Milkdown.)
I will provide some basic typography handling for ellipsis, etc. as well before publishing with the idea to provide examples… What’s for sure, I want collaborators and people willing to push things much further… I’ve stated this already and I repeat, I’m to old for this shit…
