What's in your dream text editor?

[Evan]

Hey everyone,

We're in the early stages of working on a revamped text editor. If that sounds familiar, it's because we recently rolled out a new text editor your Ning Network's blogs and forum discussions:

However, it became clear the text editor we implemented had a lot of limitations, namely that it doesn't handle text as well as it should (both text that's written in the editor and text pasted in) and it's very difficult to add buttons to "HTML" mode.

We're looking at starting fresh, with a new editor, instead of continuing to customize and debug the current one. We want to hear from you — what do you want in a text editor? What's important to you? What buttons or tools do you rely on, of those that are there today and those that aren't.

This project may take a while, but we want to get your input now while we're in the planning phase.

Thanks!
Evan

[Brian Floe]

oh yeah, how could we forget the much criticized "quote" functionality on Ning. Thanks for adding that - it's seconded from here.

[Janettee McCrary]

You're welcome:)

[Anna Raddatz]

I personally like the simplicity of the current text editing options. Since we want all of the posts to fit in with the "brand" of the rest of the site, I think it would be jarring to have different font/color options within each post.

I agree that there are some pasting issues, but I don't know enough about how it works to really have a solution for that.

[Garfield Creator]

Padding images, embedding, headings.

I think those things and the things in the editor for comments are about 90% of what I'd use.

Livejournal editor allows you to upload and download from a photobucket account and when you embed they pop open and Textarea box to add your embed code.

P.S. Textarea doesn't seem to work for forums. Textarea for when you want to display code. It works in pages though.

[Javier Tejera]

Hola a mi me gusta la parte de insertar fotografias y enlaces ,,eso me parece que funciona bien, la parte de la redacción de texto me parece que no. También me gustaría poner tablas ,,para poner los resultados de nuestros equipos mas facilmente.y a la hora de compartir el post que se pueda compartir con otras redes ning.

[Thiago Santos de Moraes]

After a poll, the members of my community voted to back the simple text editor. This editor, with colors, the justification of paragraphs, some emoticons and four or five font sizes wil be perfect.

[Mini Me]

can it be option to be chosen by the network creator? if the network cretor thinks plain text, then only plain text; if NC wants combo, then it would be combo? i know that makes it a bit harder to handle with so many network, but that's also make everybody happy. i mean, ning is letting us customize the text and so many things already.

[Evan]

Hey Mini me!

I think it's clear that NCs want choice, but before we get to choice, we have to actually build a text editor and build the options that you'd want to choose from. That's why I started this discussion — to see what tools and features in a text editor are important to you, so we can build them in and hopefully allow you to choose the tools most important to you, if there's not room for all of them.

Janettee had a great response to this, naming the tools she wants to see. If you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see, share them here!

/Evan
Ning Product Manager

[Janettee McCrary]

Thanks:)

[Thomas Mitchell]

My fantasy would be a "CSS tool" driven by a dumbed-down version of a Dreamweaver-style toolbar. HTML with enough WYSIWYG via buttons to make it usable for non-coders. A big goal would be to drop in images, resize and set placement with wraparound options. Meantime, I guess the RichText/HTML hybrid is pretty good for now.

[Evan]

Hey Thomas!

Could you clarify what you mean by a "CSS tool"? I'm not totally clear.

/Evan
Ning Product Manager

[Thomas Mitchell]

Thanks, Evan -- Fantasies generally aren't too clear! But using, say, Dreamweaver CS3 as a model where you can apply CSS attributes from a menu -- that would be nice. Not sure how that could work via Ning, but building a viable model starting with basic CSS box/text/color attributes could perhaps be done? I'm more a designer than programmer so am a bit out of my league, but I can still dream.

Now, when I need to do finely structured posts with padded images, media and text, I usually build them out in DW (generally -- ugh -- tables instead of CSS) and copy the HTML over with fresh image links. I know this is lame, but my motto is "if it works..." So the objective for a "CSS tool" would be to enable folks like me to employ CSS at a WYSIWYG level.