WYSIWYG Needs Work

TLDR:Are there any plans to implement a better wysiwyg editor (tinymce ckeditor) and improve the wysiwyg plugin?

I've implemented Foswiki. It's pretty solid, but the Wysiwyg editor is terrible. I see plenty of questions regarding it and this community tends to write people off. From the editor encoding <> on switches from wysiwyg to text, or everything being double spaced (<p> tags vs br), lack of easy click code buttons (I know about literal tags and chili), poor maintenance of text formatting or format clearing. I can manually remove all formatting on paste (using init), but no paste as plain text as an option.

Use the text mode, update the "TINYMCEPLUGIN_INIT_TOPIC", attach a .css file to override <p> spacing (and subsequently set it in tinymce topic). These are all work arounds to a fundamentally broken system. I can give the system to developers and engineers and they can make it work. Regarding a regular end user, it's worthless. I really dig the system, but I need something a regular person can use. Last references to updating the wysiwyg editor is like 2012 and we're still on tinymce 3. I don't see wysiwyg on the roadmap. Will this ever be a priority, or is this just not for a regular end user?

-- RyanLewkowicz

Unfortunately TinyMCE changed their API enough between 3.x and 4.x. that it's not just a simple drop-in upgrade. I went through the upgrade process a year or so ago and had to revert it as there were too many problems.

I'm sorry that we come across as "writing people off", it's certainly not our intention. The developers are all volunteers, with varying amounts of available time, and WYSIWYG is unfortunately a bit of a thankless task. Getting "white space" right is a really difficult challenge. A lot of work has been done by MichaelDaum on the Nat editor, making it easier to learn the TML language and for better or worse, more experienced Wiki users tend to eventually edit in TML directly. Probably at least partly because of the issues you point out.

Part of the challenge of the TML to HTML to TML round-trip is that TML is white-space delimited. HTML is not. HTML is much richer than what TML can express. Any changes to the editor must preserve line spacing, or Wiki Applications that expect TML formatting will be broken.

Certainly we enthusiastically welcome new developers. If you or others want to take on an upgrade of the Wysiwyg TMCE editor, it would be a welcome contribution.

I'm marking this as needing follow-up in tasks, but realistically it needs a developer able to take on the effort.