On 06 Jun 2016, at 18:32, Marius Dumitru Florea <[email protected]> wrote:
On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 6:37 PM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
On 06 Jun 2016, at 16:47, Marius Dumitru Florea < [email protected]> wrote:
On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 1:05 AM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Marius,
On 03 Jun 2016, at 20:29, Marius Dumitru Florea < [email protected]> wrote:
Hi devs,
While working on adding extension points to support the replacement of the current WYSIWYG editor I came to the conclusion that we need to make a clear distinction between Edit Modes and Editors.
An Edit Mode is basically an HTML *form* that allows you to edit some data that is associated with an XWiki document. There can be for instance an edit mode to edit the document title and content, another edit mode to edit the document objects, another one to edit the document access rights, and so on. Ideally, XWiki extensions should be able to provide new edit modes. The current place where we expose the Edit Modes is the Edit Menu. Class, Objects, Access Rights, Inline Form are well defined edit modes. Before we talk about the Wiki and WYSIWYG "edit modes" let's define what an editor is.
An Editor is basically a form *field*. Most of the time it is an enhanced form field, a widget, that allows you to edit a single document field. The editor obviously depends on the field type. There can be a date editor (known as date picker), a plain text editor, a rich text editor, and so on. Ideally, XWiki extensions should be able to provide new editors for specific data types. For instance an extension could replace the date picker. Another one could replace the rich text editor.
The relation between Edit Modes and Editors is many to many. An Edit Mode can use multiple editors and an Editor can be used by multiple Edit Modes. For instance the rich text editor can be used in the "Content" edit mode (for document content) but also in the Inline Form edit mode, for TextArea object properties.
If we agree with this distinction then I think XWiki should have separate extension points for Edit Modes vs. Editors.
So far so good, I completely agree :)
What does this mean for the CKEditor integration? Well, CKEditor is an editor.. so it doesn't make sense to have a "CKEditor" edit mode. CKEditor can be used to edit the document content as well as the TextArea object properties that contain wiki syntax. So there should be no "CKEditor" entry in the Edit Menu. Otherwise we need to add "Inline Form - CKEditor" also, and so on for each Edit Mode that can use the CKEditor.
So I think we should go in the following direction:
* Replace Wiki and WYSIWYG entries from the Edit menu with a single Entry that will represent the Edit Mode for editing the document title, content and syntax. I'm not yet sure what name should we use for this Edit Mode. Let's call it "Content" for now. * The default edit action (for simple users) will ** open the Inline Form edit mode if the document has a sheet associated ** open the "Content" edit mode otherwise * The "Content" edit mode will use the Editor configured in the User Profile, falling-back on the wiki preferences
And also falling back on the global preferences for the farm if not defined at the wiki level.
* The Inline Form edit mode will use for TextArea properties the Editor specified in the property meta data, falling-back on the User Profile setting, then on the wiki preferences * We should have an administration section to configure the default Editor as wiki level (wiki preferences)
We don't have to implement all this right away. I'd like to start by making the editor list from the TextArea meta data, User Profile and wiki preferences extensible, so that CKEditor can add its entry there.
WDYT?
So I agree with everything you said. However it could also be possible to also have edit mode with editors. For example consider the following edit menu:
Edit |_ Content |_ … With Default Editor |_ … With GWT WYSIWYG |_ … With CKEditor |_ … With Wiki Editor |_ Inline / Form …
So the Edit > Content menu entry could have sub menu entries to choose explicitly which editor to edit with for the fields which support a "content editor”.
There could be other options but I would definitely not like a solution where I have to go to my profile and change my preferences whenever I need to change the editor to edit a given page. There are several reasons for this:
* Some pages are good to be edited in WYSIWYG (pure content pages), while others are better edited using the wiki editor (code pages)
We should be able to configure the preferred editors for a given wiki page like we do for user, wiki and farm. And we can with nested pages, by using the "space" preferences. The code "space" of an application could be configured to use the plain text editor for instance. The question is what is the fall-back chain? Can the user overwrite the preferred editor as page or wiki level?
That’s not what I meant. We’re not going to force users to have to set an admin option per wiki page! :)
When editing a page the user needs to be able to choose whether he wants to edit with a visual editor or a syntax editor.
You are referring to plain wiki pages here, but users interact a lot with structured pages also where they cannot choose from the edit menu the visual editor or the syntax editor.
Indeed, and that’s a recurrent problem we have. We need to offer the user the option to switch to another editor too when editing xproperties. Thanks -Vincent
* Right now we already have a similar issue with showing hidden pages. It
take a lot of time to switch back and forth and for devs it’s a pain.
So while I agree with everything you said, I’d like that we also find a way to be able to very quickly select which editor to use without having to set it in your profile.
This translates into another configuration level: request. It means being able to overwrite the preferred editors for a specific request. But this is generic and could be used for other configuration options, like the hidden pages.
Yes per request. But that’s technical. We need to find how it translates in the UI. One option I mentioned is shortcut keys but that may not be enough. Another idea is also what I suggested with the Edit menu showing various options.
Thanks -Vincent
I guess one solution could be to have shortcuts keys to force editing with
a given editor. I don’t know if it would be good enough though.
WDYT?
Thanks -Vincent
Thanks, Marius