By AndrewE on

I have been using Drupal for the past 3 months now and I find it lives upto all my expectations bar one thing: Text input.

I use FCKeditor and although better than htmlarea it still has so many flaws.

I was wondering, since text input is one of the most important aspects of any website, is it so hard to make a simple input editor? How come this issue has been left out of the programming development? Is there any future for text imput that is compaitble on all browsers?

Comments

grohk’s picture

grohk commented

If it was easy, then it wouldn't be as hard to implement. From my limited knowledge on the issue the main problems lie in the fact that both these text editors are javascript (client-side) based and different browsers behave differently using javascript.

Quite simply, the best cross platform way to format text into a drupal system has been implemented. That is what HTML is. I guess we can't expect normal users to learn that, but if you are looking for a simpler way of marking up text then I suggest the Markdown module for now.

I too am hoping that the javascript text editors will someday be more workable than they currently are. In fact my main desire is that I could have the text editor generate Markdown instead of HTML, since I think it is much easier to read. But that is yet another layer of complexity on the system already and there is much work to be done.

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Code Orange: Drink Your Juice

gordon’s picture

gordon commented

Just so you know, there is actually a fork of htmlarea called Xinha which has alot of the bugs fixed and is alot better than htmlarea.

I am currently making changes to the htmlarea module that will allow Xinha work without having to fiddle with the installation of it. I am hoping to have this done by the end of the weekend and have htmlarea (js) removed from cvs.
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Gordon Heydon
Heydon Consulting

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Gordon Heydon

AndrewE’s picture

AndrewE commented

Thanks for response all.

Drupal has its flaws that's for sure, but they are more than made up for by such a wicked community!

I'll definitely be looking out for Xinha.

Thanks

FrancisQ

The Green Room

Geary’s picture

Geary commented

I'm eager to try out Xinha with Drupal. On my 1.2GHz ThinkPad running Firefox, FCKeditor is painfully slow--it doesn't keep up with my typing. Xinha, OTOH, seems just fine (at least in the small tests I've tried).

gordon’s picture

gordon commented

I have just commited some work to allow Xinha to work with htmlarea basically out of the box.

To get Xinha working just unpack the Xinha tar into your htmlarea module directory. so not only will you have a HTMLArea-CVS you will also have a xinha-latest or xinha depending on how you got it. This will be used before HTMLArea-CVS version.

Over the next week I am going to be removing the HTMLArea js from the drupal repository. I will have the drupal plugins in a directory so they can be installed if you want them.

I also need to update the documentation as well so that it will be easier for people to install.

IF you have any problems please contact me.

Thanks.
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Gordon Heydon
Heydon Consulting

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Gordon Heydon

Geary’s picture

Geary commented

It may just be my ignorance, but where would I find this? I don't see anything in the CVS commit messages.

Thanks!

gordon’s picture

gordon commented

it is in cvs, but it hasn't yet been put into drupal. see 1.68 which has the changes
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Gordon Heydon
Heydon Consulting

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Gordon Heydon

moshe weitzman’s picture

moshe weitzman commented

instead of HTML, you might ask users to post in the markdown syntax, or in textile or bbcode if you like those. those filters are much more reliable that htmlarea and friends. Just install a Contrib module with a name I used above.

freyquency’s picture

freyquency commented

Another issue with htmlarea... It worked fine for me, until i looked at the code it produced. it was messy to say the least.

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gordon’s picture

gordon commented

You can use the htmltidy plugin which will clean it up for you. HTMLArea/Xinha are to make entry easier for people who are not very good at entring html into a textarea. Also I have found that different browsers are cleaner than others. eg. firefox verses IE.
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Gordon Heydon
Heydon Consulting

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Gordon Heydon

AndrewE’s picture

AndrewE commented

Continuing my quest for a reasonable text editor, I tried installing xinha. Basically dld it from the xinha site, uploaded that folder (xinha-latest) to my drupal/modules/htmlarea folder, dld the updated htmlarea.module file provided by Gordon in CVS and uploaded it to drupal/modules/htmlarea then when i tried to access my site I got this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: drupal_get_path() in /home/eglinton/domains/andreweglinton.com/public_html/drupal/modules/htmlarea/htmlarea.module on line 515

Not sure what the problem is there. I had a look at line 515 of the htmlarea.module and it has this:

elseif (file_exists(drupal_get_path("module", "htmlarea") ."/htmlarea/htmlarea.js")) {
$path = drupal_get_path("module", "htmlarea") ."/htmlarea";

Any ideas anyone?

The Green Room

gordon’s picture

gordon commented

your site is not running cvs of drupal. The cvs version of htmlarea will only work with the cvs version of drupal.
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Gordon Heydon
Heydon Consulting

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Gordon Heydon

tedsmith’s picture

tedsmith commented

I loaded these and did as you have suggested. Put the xinha plugins into the htmlarea plugin directory, and all the rest straight into the htmlarea dir. The htmlarea module appears in admin>modules. But I don'e get any option to edit text in the text area of a page when creating. Am I missing something (have not used csv versions. I run Drupal 4.6)

Ted Smith