Text formatting options for WebYep?

Legacy Dynamo
1

I absolutely love WebYep, especially Max’s WebYep actions. But it
(WebYep itself) is also really starting to piss me off!

Im using the TinyMCE formatting engine add-on - which I strongly
suspect is the root of the problem: I’m running into regular issues
with what it produces.

For example, if I select a line and apply the H2 style, it always
wraps a plain-style span tag around the first character, so although
it is within the H2 tag set it doesn’t look right. It also puts a
spurious BR tag just before the closing H2 tag.

I’ve just been trying to apply a link to some text - it shows in the
editor window, but when I save it, it doesn’t change the text. And
when I go back in, the link isn’t there. Hugely frustrating for me -
it would seriously undermine confidence in the site if/when my
colleagues start noticing this sort of thing.

When I look at the HTML directly in the editor window it is a huge
(and I mean enormous) mess of span tags and redundant stylings. But
sometimes if I clean it up (properly and carefully) the result isn’t
right, or the change is lost, or other oddities.

Is there an alternative to TinyMCE that someone can recommend? Or is
there perhaps an update? Anyone else seeing similar little weirdies?

k

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2

There’s FCKEditor and RTE also. I believe those are the only 3 editors that WY supports but I don’t know if they’re any better than Tiny in this respect. I’ve noticed this also and perhaps the only other option is to select HTML mode and add the code manually.

Todd

On Sep 4, 2008, at 7:04 AM, Keith Martin wrote:

Is there an alternative to TinyMCE that someone can recommend? Or is

there perhaps an update? Anyone else seeing similar little weirdies?

3

Keith,

I’ve seen these issues, and as a result, resist (where possible) giving the client a rich text editor.

We start off giving the client the plain text editor and a collection of custom WebYep styles set up in Freeway to draw upon when required.

The code in the plain text editor would then be something like:

We have even styled the tr and table so the client can easily create tables, using the | character.

The client has an admin page where they can view all of the created styles, and request extra styles to be added.

At least this gives you a modicum of control to globally change a style across a whole site from within Freeway.

When you consider the average user just actually needs bold, italic, or a bit of coloured text, its little hardship for them.

David

On 4 Sep 2008, at 13:04, Keith Martin wrote:

When I look at the HTML directly in the editor window it is a huge

(and I mean enormous) mess of span tags and redundant stylings. But

sometimes if I clean it up (properly and carefully) the result isn’t

right, or the change is lost, or other oddities.

Is there an alternative to TinyMCE that someone can recommend? Or is

there perhaps an update? Anyone else seeing similar little weirdies?

David Owen

http://www.ineedwebhosting.co.uk

4

Sometime around 4/9/08 (at 14:07 +0100) David Owen said:

When you consider the average user just actually needs bold, italic,
or a bit of coloured text, its little hardship for them.

Very true, and an interesting approach.

Could you possible elaborate a little on how you handle this? Does
the client need to write tags? How do they actually go about applying
formatting?

k

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5

The tags are as in my lost post, here there are again:

The code in the plain text editor would then be something like:

You just make sure a style is applied in a bit of text somewhere in the Freeway document (a style page) so its uploaded to the style sheet.

Make sure the style is not a Freeway paragraph style, and its written and CAPS.

Then the end user types in:-

Bingo.

On 4 Sep 2008, at 14:18, Keith Martin wrote:

Does

the client need to write tags?

David Owen

http://www.ineedwebhosting.co.uk

6

Sometime around 4/9/08 (at 14:56 +0100) David Owen said:

the end user types in:-

So, you mean like this?

Assuming I’d made a character style called “STRESS” of course…?

Bingo indeed. Not really all that user-friendly, but a heck of a
lot better than asking them to work with proper tags or fix code
errors introduced by TinyMCE. I’ll experiment with this on a test
page and see how it feels. Thanks!

k

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7

Yes.

There is already a default BOLD style already set up in WebYep plain long text (Look in Help link in the pop up window)

Just type:

Open Bracket, BOLD being the style name followed by a space, then the text, close bracket.

These styles don’t carry across a line return though.

There are others in the help section to control lists.

Not perfect, but clients find them quite easy to use.

On 4 Sep 2008, at 16:09, Keith Martin wrote:

So, you mean like this?

David Owen

http://www.ineedwebhosting.co.uk

8

Hi Keith
I have to say all the Richtext editors have there faults, I suppose that’s one of the problem with free software… :o(
Like David I too tend not to give clients richtext unless necessary and to expand on Davids comments (which is what I tend to do too)
if you wanted to make some style called “STRESS” and you wanted to apply your style you would change this:

  example text example text example text.

to this

 <STRESS example text example text example text.>

then this would style that complete line
if you wanted to style part of the line of copy you could do this:

  <STRESS example text> example text example text.

This would only style the first ‘example text’
if you wanted to style two lines then you would need to apply the style to both lines as below:

  <STRESS example text example text example text.>
  <STRESS example text example text example text.>

There has been some improvements recently with TinyMCE and you may want to make sure you have the latest variant
I hope this helps
kind regards max

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9

I have to say all the Richtext editors have there faults, I suppose
that’s one of the problem with free software… :o(

I guess so.

I have to say that I have very mixed feelings about WebYep right now.

On the one hand it is amazing, and Max, your actions are superb.

But on the other hand - no, I really don’t regard asking people to
type tags of any kind to be good enough, and the behaviour I’m
getting from TinyMCE is certainly NOT good enough either. So, for
anything that requires more than plain text controlled entirely
externally, WebYep is arguably just not good enough.

The WebYep developers really should put some serious effort into
providing a basic set of formatting tools for people, something
that’s written specifically for WebYep and that doesn’t flake out all
the time.

[sigh]

I suppose I’m biased, having battled with this and knowing how
unhappy my colleagues would be at having to use tags of any kind, but
I can’t see how any other forthcoming WebYep feature could be more
important. Relying on third-party rich-text editor plugins is clearly
not reliable enough.

k

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10

HI Keith
As a bit of background, some time ago a lot of webyep users where demanding a RichText editor within webyep it’s self, and as a result OBD halted development of the LongText box to concentrate on that item. As it’s turned out the realities are the designers wanted rich-text but giving it to clients hasnt always turned out to be a good thing, as design goes out the window when you give complete control over to the client…
Plus as you have found out all of the wysiwyg editors are flawed, which again is not good. I too feel with just a small amount of user interface like bold button etc in the long-text box, then this action would become my action of choice (well it is anyway).

The latest pre-release webyep system has a gallery action which again has been something that people have been screamimg to have but oddly enough even though its great to have, a far more important development in this webyep version is the ability target differnt pages in the webyep menu.

It doesn’t look cool and the webyep menu is not new, but in reality this advancement means you can have different layout templates and you can choose which template to use depending on your layout requirements from within the menu (before you were stuck with one layout within the webyep menu).

The LongText action could also do with this sort of development ( a small tweak but a massive impact) and for all I know it is probably being done at the moment, but it wouldn’t harm if people wrote to OBD to see if there were any plans to develop this action further.

As an alternative there is a way to make the RichText editor into a cut down editor “simple editor” within webyep. The downside is it cant be targeted to one instance of any RichText item and as such it effects all occurrences of this action. But if anyone needs to do this please let me know and I will send them the file that will do it.

I hope this helps to give every one a little bit of background on how these actions/items have been arrived at, and also help us all think about what we need and what we would like.

all the best Max
P.S. if I hear anything about the LongText action I will let you know

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11

I agree, in fact, giving an ordinary client a rich text item, is a recipe for disaster to your carefully crafted layouts surrounding the clients editable section. I’ve had more bother explaining why big red text in capitals does not help the layout as a whole. But equally if they agree that design layout is important, then a carefully prepared WebYep page is perfectly adequate and a sensible cost to implement.

David

On 6 Sep 2008, at 8:42 am, max wrote:

but giving it to clients hasnt always turned out to be a good thing, as design goes out the window when you give complete control over to the client…

David Owen ::
Freeway Friendly Web Hosting and Domains
http://www.PrintlineAdvertising.co.uk/freeway

12

Keith, just out interest, what are you trying to do with the rich text item? Prepare a whole page section with headings and all?

If I had an idea what your trying to do, I could share the WebYep workarounds I’ve found.

On 6 Sep 2008, at 1:45 am, Keith Martin wrote:

I suppose I’m biased, having battled with this and knowing how

unhappy my colleagues would be at having to use tags of any kind, but

I can’t see how any other forthcoming WebYep feature could be more

important. Relying on third-party rich-text editor plugins is clearly

not reliable enough.

David Owen ::
Freeway Friendly Web Hosting and Domains
http://www.PrintlineAdvertising.co.uk/freeway

13

Sometime around 6/9/08 (at 11:00 +0100) David Owen said:

Keith, just out interest, what are you trying to do with the rich
text item? Prepare a whole page section with headings and all?

No, nothing even remotely that complex. It is a regular site with
headers, text areas and so on. I’d post a link, but it was recently
agreed to put it behind password access until the content was all in
place. Shouldn’t be long now, maybe a week.

I couldn’t agree more with the statements about the dangers of
‘handing the keys’ to the client in design terms. I guess it really
is a difficult call regarding how much control to give, as Max
alluded to. For what I’m doing, all that’s needed with regards to
‘rich’ text controls are:

Bold
List
Header style
Link creation

There’s a body style that defines the font basics and a couple of H
styles - but only H2 is used (for crossheads) in the rich text areas.

Of the five people that are meant to use this, there’s me, one other
code-aware guy, an editorial-oriented chap who doesn’t code, and two
senior staff who simply will not ever handle wrapping in the
slightest bit of code to format things. Trust me. Trying to get them
to do this would be ineffective and inappropriate. :slight_smile:

In an ideal world one answer would be a way to enable just the
formatting options required, only unlocking the parts that were
really needed. Meaning in this case simple controls for just the
above settings.

I think the distance between no styling at all (other than coaxed by
dropping in tag-like controls or predefined by clever CSS
construction) and the features that things such as TinyMCE provide is
waaay too big.

But actually, it isn’t that that has got me going; I can (yes really)
trust my colleagues to be restrained and follow general content
formatting guidance. What caused my slightly embarassing but
heart-felt tirade last night was - on top of the incredible amount of
self-cancelling formatting junk hidden in the text - being stymied
yet again by some bug that prevented any WebYep rich text changes
from being applied. I’d edit content, click Save, and it just
wouldn’t work. The changes weren’t stored, and sometimes the editor
window wouldn’t even close.

So far I don’t think anyone else has hit this problem. I hope it
remains that way, but really - crossing my fingers is not the right
way to go about this sort of thing!

I’ve just updated TinyMCE to the latest stable build. That’s top of
the suspect list, so maybe the minor incremental upgrade will help.

Thanks for listening, everyone! I do still think that WebYep is very
good and the Freeway actions are awesome. But there are definite
issues that arise when it comes to mixing in add-ons to provide even
basic formatting controls.

k

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14

HI Keith could you tell me if you are using safari to edit the richtext
cheers
max

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15

I’m using Safari 3, while others will generally be using IE6 or 7.

k

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16

Hi Keith
I have been trying to duplicate your problems and using safari I am finding it’s blooming terrible… could you tell me if you have tried Firefox If not could you try it as I cant get the faults you describe using that browser. Though using safari I get a shed load !!!

max

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17

using safari I am finding it’s blooming terrible

Aha - no, I haven’t tried using Firefox. Sounds like I should. Thanks
very much for this!

k

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18

Just read this post and FF is definitely more friendly to WY and Tiny MCE. It also seems that the latest version of Tiny MCE is more stable.

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