Planned WYSIWYG editor only pro (paid) version?

Archive
21

I’m less concerned about it being pro and more concerned about a fair price. If I have to make a one off payment of £20 to get it, thats fine. Anything more becomes exclusive and may cause me to start looking for more freely availible platforms.

Having said that msybe someone can make a free plugin version.

22

After spending years giving my clients WYSIWYG editors at their fingertips, I find the Markdown editor to be liberation. My clients are small-business owners who are too busy running their business to properly learn web editing. They expect it to be like a word processor and then they struggle and make horrible code.

With the markdown editor, they have just the tools they need to write content. With a bit of effort by the developer, blueprints can altered giving people simple forms to keep their content structured. If you give the un-learned too many tools, they will make a big mess. Markdown solves this to great extent.

With that being said, adding a picture to a page could be a lot better. It would be nice to be able to have the markdown editor insert an image with some Grav media options like ![Bob](this-is-bob.jpg?cropResize=800,600) I can learn those querystrings, but if there was a way (and maybe there is) to have a button that adds them, that would make Markdown all I need.

23

On a lazy Sunday morning, I decided to survey the state of what I call Pure WYSIWYG Markdown Editors in July of 2016. I define it as:

  1. A JS-based editor which does not show formatting (or at least it can be hidden by default).
  2. Allows all common markup formats (bold, italicized, lists, etc).
  3. Outputs Markdown, with satisfactory results (follows conventions).
  4. Close to plug-and-play architecture (low threshold of configuration and dependencies).

Also, if it were to be an alternative implementation for Grav - as a plugin for an editor - it needs to have a solid base of development and well-written architecture. Ease of integration and extendability does not hurt either. A list of realistic alternatives, given these requirements and virtually all Markdown editor projects I have come across and could dig up (in descending order of estimated ease of integration):

  1. Medium Editor: Needs styling, lightweight
    • Solid and mature architecture, handful of useful plugins, easy to integrate
    • Does not support Markdown macro s
  2. Substance: Needs building an extension
    • Solid and mature architecture, variety of plugins/themes, requires building an extension for Markdown to integrate
    • Planned support for Markdown macros (this month)
  3. Pen Editor: Need styling, very lightweight
    • Green but strong architecture, limited extensibility, features might limit integration
    • Supports Markdown macros
  4. WoofMark: Needs heavy customization, lightweight
    • Fairly green architecture, no plugins/themes, easy to integrate
    • Does not support Markdown macros
  5. CKEditor: Outdated plugin, potentially heavyweight
    • Solid and mature architecture, variety of plugins/themes, fairly easy to integrate
    • Does not support Markdown macros
  6. StackEdit: Needs heavy customization
    • Solid and mature architecture, already heavily integrated with features, fairly difficult to integrate (functionality must be separated from core)
    • Hybrid-WYSIWYG (hiding formatting is unclear)

As you can see, from an initial selection of about 30-40 self-proclaimed WYSIWYG editors, 6 remain. The common belief is that visible formatting is a strength of Markdown editing, and even though there is a high demand for a WYSIWYG alternative there are few options - mostly because many attempts are abandoned or focused on OS-editors (Windows, Linux, Mac, not open source web).

That said, Medium Editor and Substance seem to me to be potentially great alternative editors for Grav which allow a full WYSIWYG experience. Pen Editor and WoofMark are decent alternatives for simpler integrations, and lack the development and architecture of the first two. CKEditor is a heavy beast in itself (and the Markdown plugin is outdated) and whilst StackEdit is a favorite of mine, neither are really suited for layering ontop of Grav due to their specific nature and purpose.

Given the time, I might try my hand at a plugin bundling in one of them. However, as I have written previously: The desired functionality of the current Grav Editor is hiding formatting; integrating something new ontop of this is using a sledgehammer where a chisel is needed.

24

Nice summary post! I hadn’t seen “Substance” before so that is a new one for me.

What would be great is a list of “Markdown” WYSIWYG editors… Those are few and far between. The only real options I know of are:

  • WoofMark - Pretty good, but strips any invalid markdown/html
  • ProseMirror - Also good, and very powerful, but again strips invalid markdown/html
  • Hallo.js - inline editor and quite simplistic
25

Hi. Already posted this in another thread. I’ve managed to integrate StackEdit with Grav. It’s still not ready for a release to the “wild” but it works fine on my dev site. I even integrated some extra features into StackEdit, some of them available for Grav, others which I felt necessary like external media services support…

Regards.
uh

Studioeditor_stackedit_fullscreen Studioeditor_with_stackedit

26

Awesome, Will Check

27

@saveva, a StackEdit-plugin for Grav would be awesome!

28

That’s pretty cool! :slight_smile: