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New fixes, flexibility in your text editor

The text editor, used across many parts of your Ning Networks, has just been revamped with some fixes and improvements. 

No More Unwanted Line Breaks in Pages

As many Network Creators have pointed out, the text editor on the Pages feature can add unwanted line breaks when switching between HTML and Visual mode. The issue: <br /> tags were added at the end of each line of text after switching back to HTML view. 

This has now been fixed, and should no longer occur on Pages.

 

Autorecover

We've added a new "Autorecover" feature to the text editor to help anyone who accidentally loses what they were working on in the text editor. After working on a blog post, discussion or broadcast message that is at least 50 characters long, you'll notice an "Autorecover" link appear at the bottom of the editor:

If you refresh the page (or your browser crashes for some reason and you return to the page), you'll see the Autorecover link appear. Click it, and the last-saved version of the post will appear! This Autorecover link will be available for up to 20 minutes (new versions are saved every 60 seconds).

 

New options that fix Blockquoting and wrap text in <p> tags

If you use the blockquote function a lot, you may have noticed that there can be a problem with the blockquote tool in the text editor: You can't un-blockquote text after you have turned blockquoting on. 

That problem was caused by turning off a rule in the text editor that wraps your text in <p> tags, even when using HTML mode. To fix the blockquoting issue, we're testing out a new option for NCs to force all text to be wrapped in <p> tags, even when using the HTML view — which today uses <br /> tags each time you hit return.

You can find the new checkbox on the Text Editor page in your Dashboard, under the "Features" section of your Settings:

Hit the checkbox for "Switching to WYSIWYG view forces all text in paragraph tags," and all of your paragraphs will use <p> tags. And, your blockquote button should work correctly. 

We'd love your feedback on how you like this option. We're considering rolling it out platform-wide, but we want to hear how you use it.

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Replies

  • NC for Hire
    Hi

    The dreaded phantom paragraph break has returned: this time some script in a text box on the homepage of my test site is continually being wrapped in para tags, creating an unwanted space on a slider.
    To quote Roy Batty .... "Questions" ....

    Is anyone else experiencing this? Does anyone have a fix? How hard is it to get a text editor that works on Ning?

    SP
  • When will you add a spell checker?

    Black Hat ron

     

  • Nice work! One add'l idea that might help:

     

    Is there any way to allow NC's to save/retrieve/log past "Message Broadcasts?"

     

    Scott

  • New bug?

    In a reply to a discussion, the <span></span> tag has ceased to work.

    Is it because it adds </p> tags?

    3198945?profile=originalAnd the actual content between the <span></span> tags has been removed!

    • its also an empty span nothing between opening and closing so gets removed affdd a . or ninbreaking sopace and the tags wont be removed

    • Hey Michael!

      Nope. It looks like it's because you had bad HTML (you didn't close the opening <span> tag and added the word "brilliant" as an attribute onto the span tag), so there was no text to display in that span. If you close your span tag and then add the word between the opening and closing span tags, it should work fine. Let me know if that's not the case!

      /Evan
      Ning Product Manager

      • DUH!

        Thanks Evan, works fine when I write my HTML correctly =)

        Gotta be more careful with Cut & Paste.

  • While we're talking text editor bugs, here's one I've found, which is very serious because it deletes content.

    If you add a HTML comment in non-WYSIWYG mode to a blog post, Ning deletes not only the contents of the HTML comment, but all the content that comes after the comment.

    Imagine adding a small comment early in a long post, and then finding out that all subsequent content in your post has been deleted.

    • Colin - regarding the issue with adding an HTML comment in non-WYSIWYG mode, could you post an example of the HTML comment?

      I tried pasting the following into non-WYSIWYG mode for a blog post, but it didn't seem to lose the content that comes after the comment:

      <!-- test comment -->Hello, world.

      • My comment was more like this:

        <!-- 

        A large amount of text, including links and images

         -->

        And there were a large amount of text and images here that got deleted. I raised a bug report about it, and got an auto-reply, but nothing more.

        It happened when editing an existing blog post. 

This reply was deleted.

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