WYSIWYG editor

A WYSIWYG HTML editor. Students will need to create web pages for their
assignments in weeks 2-3

A good option would be:
TinyMCE - http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/

Distributed under LGPL

This is very extensible and the full featured version is probably too much;
there is an example configuration that looks appropriate at
http://wiki.moxiecode.com/examples/tinymce/installation_example_01.php

2008-02-28 18:36
mattgiuca Says:

Potentially to be written as a separate CGI app to be run on a server
somewhere. This will force students to copy the HTML source into their own
files, so they are forced to read the HTML.

2008-07-01 12:34
stevenbird

Replace EditArea at the same time.

2008-07-01 13:10
mattgiuca Says:

To add a bit more info:

What we propose is that we first pop a standard, flexible WYSIWYG HTML
editor (I guess we'll just make the 'edit' application choose which one to
use based on the file extension - .html uses WYSIWYG, and anything else
uses EditArea).

Then, we modify the WYSIWYG editor to support an alternate 'text' mode,
which

- Hides all the formatting controls, leaving just the text behind.
- Automatically goes in and applies colour formatting as syntax
highlighting.
- Strips out all formatting when saving (just saves raw text).

This then replaces EditArea, so we always give you the WYSIWYG editor. It
has a toggle switch to switch between HTML and Text mode, and the default
mode is based on the file extension.

2008-07-02 10:38
wagrant Says:

IMO, a combination of CodePress and TinyMCE looks best, with a button to
switch between them. I realise that you (Matt) decided originally that
EditArea was a better choice then CodePress, but CodePress isn't horribly
slow and buggy. Python support can easily be added to CodePress. What do
you think?

2008-07-02 12:55
mattgiuca

Yeah CodePress does feel significantly better than EditArea (from a quick
play I just had). Not sure what the original decision was made for -
probably the existance of the Python highlighting tipped the scales in
favour of EditArea - but I agree it shouldn't be too hard to add Python
support.

2008-07-07 20:42
wagrant Says:

CodePress support is implemented and in trunk, and TinyMCE is coming soon.

2008-07-09 17:29
wagrant Says:

Having spent the past couple of hours trying to integrate TinyMCE, some
major issues have cropped up. Browser-based WYSIWYG editors are at best
horribly fragile, and IVLE's JavaScript seems to break it horribly. I can
get it slightly working if I don't have the filebrowser and editor JS
included. It's going to be highly nontrivial to get it working properly,
and even harder to get it working well.

Is this really that high of a priority? Programmers shouldn't be afraid of
(X)HTML...

2008-07-09 22:42
mattgiuca Says:

It's definitely a strong recommendation from the academics. I personally
think it's a good idea because you can learn HTML a lot better if you're
able to view the code results of your own visual creations.