Forum OpenACS Q&A: WYSIWYG editor...

David,

The best way to integrate something like that would be to write a form builder widget.

Right now we have the richtext form builder widget. I recently started work to get the richtext widget working in ETP. You can see it working at http://www.thedesignexperience.org:8089/edit-this-page/

If you register you will be able to add pages and edit them.

If you find any bugs, please don't reply to this thread, I am still working on it. Email me or visit #openacs on irc.freenode.net

I haven't looked at Robert's widget. It is not a form-builder widget, and richtext already is. So it only takes a couple of lines of code to make it work.

I would like to build a rich text widget with more features in OpenACS.

It looks like I can't seem to get the ad_form version of etp-edit working quite correctly so if anyone tries that link, it will probably be broken.

Since this editor is going to be used (at least in our case) by the editors of the site and since we are using Mozilla as the standard browser, we are looking into Mozilla Editor, as pointed by Jun. It's really neat and works very well. The problem is that if you were to provide a functionality for people to edit their pages in a community, well, 95% of -at least our- users are using IE... :( ... but maybe we could just tell them: "you use IE? No WYSIWYG for you" ;).

Just my 2 cents

I have added a WYSIWYG editor into ETP for a project I'm working on. Here are the details of how to add it:

https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=115599

(note the test login doesn't work anymore)

I also integrated (in an ad-hoc fashion) the WYSIWYG editor into Photo Album to allow you to insert images into a ETP by choosing the desired image from the album. This is intended for users who can't use HTML.

The editor is TextArea is open source and I used a version for IE 5.5 only. There is a beta version that works with IE and Mozilla and includes a spell checker and advanced HTML tables functionality which I will check out soon - it's worth looking at: http://dynarch.com/htmlarea/

Tom, that's what WebDAV does.

talli

Tom,

Generally we want to keep track of everything in the database. The user should never need to know if the content is stored in the database or the filesystem. Using OpenACS you can map content to a URL. (Hypothetically at least 😊

Other content management system that store "objects" in some sort of database so allows access to them through webDAV. A key feature of webDAV is the concept of properties which are additional attributes of a "resource" which is basically whatever "thing" is available at a certain URL.

OT, but related to an ETP discussion about a year ago lost in the depths of the boards (or was it just in my world?). Anyway, this suggestion is not for 5.0, but maybe 5.x or 6.0?

What if the question is rephrased to:

What editors can OpenACS import/export pages to/from?

Perhaps ETP (in the context of CMS) could function by allowing the user to download the page (in the format of their favorite editor), make changes, and then upload the file. Or, just upload a file to create a new page etc. etc.

Openoffice has an expanding set filters for importing/exporting file standards for various editors. Maybe these filters could be a jumping point for developing this "knowledge-base" system. It could be expanded beyond text formatting for applications involving graphics, such as shared development of engineering drawings, or other formats etc.

Torben,

Yes these are all good ideas. One way to accomplish the upload/download/edit/upload process is with webdaV. Word can open DAV resources.

Besides that plain old upload of content is also a good idea. One area that needs to be addressed is conversion of other formats to html, but there are solutions to that that can be integrated to OpenACS.

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply.  The WYSIWYG editor I use only works with IE5+ unfortunately.  I just saw the HTMLArea demo at http://dynarch.com/htmlarea/ and that appears to hold the most promise since it's free, feature-rich, etc.

I would be more than willing to share the code, though it would need to be cleaned up.  You can see it and our CMS in action at:
    http://209.10.210.53/

Instructions are here:
    https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=112421

There's a simple Tcl API for creating the wysiwyg widget.  It's also integrated with acs-templating so it can be created as easily as any other widget.  Though this did require a few code changes relating to the widget's need for a specialized submit button.

Not to sound critical, but using Word as a page editor -- even if that in some way simplifies the pulishing process -- I just have grave reservations about...  Unless you'd try to parse a resulting doc using something like libwv, converting it to a more sensible XML/XHTML/HTML representation...

I'd say that a properly handled textarea could be a lot more flexible than that.  Both RTE and HTMLArea linked from this thread, as well from related threads look quite promising.

Now, generating an RTF document out of whatever is stored in the dB -- that is something *very* useful.  This could, probably, be extended to be even more flexible -- why not generating an XML doc out of the dB, applying an XSL stylesheet to it and then generating an HTML/RTF/PDF/whatever representation?  One step in that direction could be making sure that all of the generated validate against XHTML TR...

Has anyone seen htmlArea version 3.0 Beta?  It includes some nice features, Im gonna try to integrate it to etp on my test page, and if I can make it work, I may post a how-to later on.

This thread has been rather interesting, lets keep on brainstorming!!!!

Windell.

Yes, it'll be in HEAD as soon as I find the time to clean it up. Have a few other half-finished little things sitting in my checkout.

/Lars