Vincent,
Yes! From a users point of view improving the following areas would make a
huge difference in useability:
* A super slick WYSIWYG editor providing similar functionality as offline
web page editors/word processors to enable users to easily and quickly enter
(and cut and paste text/images from Word, other web pages, etc) and
structure and layout the content on a page would help win over non-techie
users who don't like the wiki editor.
WYSIWYG java based web editors:
http://www.technobulls.com/2006/06/23/top-5-free-javascript-wysiwyg-editors/
For instance perhaps use an html editor like this with features added for
XWiki linking, etc:
http://www.fckeditor.net/ and
http://www.fckeditor.net/demo
This editor supports cut and paste from Word. It could be offered as an
alternative to the current wiki and WYSIWYG editors?
A WYSIWYG editor doesn't have to translate everything to wiki markup does
it? - couldn't be a mixture of both to take advantage of both and existing
html WYSIWYG editors - of course it wouldn't translate over to edit in the
wiki editor - but would you need/want to?
* A flexible means to quickly customise a wiki skin (fonts/colours/page
layouts/menus/indexes/stats/etc) to be customised for a particular wiki site
without resorting to hacking css files would be useful.
* A wizard to install XWiki on apache tomcat or other and hook it into a
database would also help eliminate common setup/installation
issues/problems.
On another note - have you seen the wiki daskboard on wikipedia by PARC
research?
http://wikidashboard.parc.com/
and an example
http://wikidashboard.parc.com/w/index.php?title=United_States_presidential_e
lection%2C_2008&diff=183392068&oldid=9947884
Regards,
Richard
-----Original Message-----
From: users-bounces(a)xwiki.org [mailto:users-bounces@xwiki.org]On Behalf
Of Vincent Massol
Sent: 10 January 2008 12:52
To: XWiki Users
Subject: Re: [xwiki-users] Wiki and WYSIWYG editing
On Jan 10, 2008, at 12:29 PM, goldring, richard wrote:
Just a thought:
Perhaps XWiki should either allow users to edit a page with the wiki
editor
or the WYSIWYG editor BUT NOT BOTH and not provide translation
between them.
My reasoning is:
* that swapping between the editors can mess up the formatting - which
annoys users no end.
* the WYSIWYG wiki output can sometimes be hard to read and even
unreadable!
* the WYSIWYG could then provide additonal formatting not currently
supported by the wiki markup more easily (in HTML directly)
* first time users get confused with the two editors and swapping
between
them and they'd prefer the WYSIWYG editor as long as it didn't mess
up their
formatting
Of course it would also be useful to provide some means via the
WYSIWYG
editor to add velocity, groovy code, HTML, etc to the page to retain
the
freedom and flexibility of the wiki editor.
What do people think?
Right now you can do what you suggest as a customization of your
instance (for example forcing the use of the WYSIWYG editor or forcing
the use of the wiki editor only).
But the main problem is that there are a few annoying bugs in the
WYSIWYG editor which can be fixed. Actually there aren't that many to
make the WYSIWYG editor really slick (probably 3-4 main ones I'd say).
Only issue is that it's a bit tricky to fix and the TinyMCE
architecture isn't really scalable for the longer term future so
that's why we've decided to implement a new WYSIWYG editor in Java
using GWT.
Now back to the current WYSIWYG editor, the XWiki project is welcoming
all patches to fix it so it's only a matter of someone with Javascript
skills providing some patches.
We're also thinking about setting up some bounties and offering some
money for people to work on specific parts of XWiki. This could be
such a domain. Another one would be about creating new skins. Do you
think this would help?
Thanks
-Vincent
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