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  4. Do we have plan to integrate a markdown editor?

Do we have plan to integrate a markdown editor?

1 Mar 16, 2016 02:57    

Just a look into feature, it seems that more and more users would like to use the markdown instead of html code. For me, it is also the thing not long ago. As a beginner, I have tasted the convenience which markdown brings to me. But sometimes, I still need to refer to the manual. So I am wondering if already has an editor (like WYSIWYG) to help the beginner get started. Yesterday when I visited the CSDN.net (the largest Chinese IT community), I found that site has integrated one. I think there are two advantages for using the editor:

  1. A quick introduction for beginners with the help of toolbar buttons.
  2. Intuitive to show the typing result. There are two columns in the editor, the left side of typing, the right side of showing instant result.
    I often make a few small mistakes when using markdown, perhaps the reason is that I am not very skilled with it , so this feature is very convenient for me to get an instant check.

At present, there are lots of open source projects about markdown editor. I found two in github, just as a reference:

1. editor.md
The open source embeddable online markdown editor (component), based on CodeMirror & jQuery & Marked.
Github: https://github.com/pandao/editor.md
Website: https://pandao.github.io/editor.md/en.html
2. simplemde-markdown-editor
A simple, beautiful, and embeddable JavaScript Markdown editor. Delightful editing for beginners and experts alike. Features built-in autosaving and spell checking
Github: https://github.com/NextStepWebs/simplemde-markdown-editor
Website: https://simplemde.com/

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3 Mar 16, 2016 23:05

These editors are very interesting indeed.

However the difficulty is that in our case we use many more renderers, not just markdown.

So if we have a javascript preview of markdown, it will still exclude rendering of many other things and it will be confusing to the user.

I am wondering if we need to develop JS previews for all our renderers.

Which view is the most useful for you:

  • Enhanced markdown alone
  • or Enhanced markdown + HTML preview pane ?
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4 Mar 17, 2016 02:41

@fplanque
Yes, it's really a heavy work if we preview for all renderers. In fact, the enhanced markdown and HTML preview pane are both useful for me, difficult to choose, even though the HTML preview could not show some rendered code correctly. (I agree that some users may get puzzled)

My idea was simple that just taking markdown render out and making it as a independent editor. Even without the HTML preview pane, i think it is also a step forward. Then there would be two possibilities:

  1. Hidden the HTML preview pane until we develop completely;
  2. Use an incomplete HTML preview and give user some notes such as: some renderers showing are in progress

For me, no matter which one to choose is all very good.

So at last , there are three editors: Markup(is it also necessary?), WYSIWYG and Markdown. This is not bad, isn't it ?

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5 Mar 17, 2016 22:45

I think in this case we would actually replace the Markup "textarea" with a "syntax colored editor".

It is true we could start with coloring markdown and progressively add more. However, here again we would need to be careful as to what happens if people disable the "markdown renderer".

Another caveat: the markdown syntax recognized by the JS editor may be different from the markdown syntax recognized by the PHP renderer plugin.

Did you find more such editors in addition to the 2 you already posted?

Thanks.

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7 May 16, 2016 04:24

@haharen Thank you.

We have researched a little about how to extend these editors in order to also take b2evolution's other renderer plugins into account. It seems pretty difficult. We will need to fork a script and will not be able to easily keep it in sync with further enhancements and bug fixes. We will research this some more.

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