suggestion: revise WYSIWYG editor

[phazei]

Please oh please dump that horrible TinyMCE v3.47. It produces poorly formatted html that makes it very difficult if you want to edit back and forth via html and wysiwyg.
CKEditor has a much better interface and produces very nice code.

[tzyganu]

@phazei I guess this is just a matter of preference. I honestly like TinyMce over CKEditor because...well...I have no reason. I just like it.
I think a better idea would be to have multiple editors. Or at least a simple way to replace the default editor. This way everyone can configure their own editor from a config setting in the backend. I've seen some CMS-es that allow this.
Do you think this would be better than just havign TinyMce or CKEditor only?

[pepijnblom]

@tzyganu Indeed, having the option to use whichever editor we prefer would be optimal. It would also open up a whole new market for customized editors.

[tzyganu]

@pepijnblom I gave it a little thought and I realized that this may be a big challenge. Keep in mind that Magento has it's own buttons for the current editor. One for widgets and one for custom variables. Using multiple editors would mean to create these buttons for each editor. It may be a lot of work. But it would be nice to have 2 or 3 editors to choose from.

[verklov]

Guys, we are considering different opinions regarding WYSIWYG solution to use in Magento 2. The simplest probably would be to upgrade TinyMCE to the most recent version.

@tzyganu, good catch regarding the Insert Widget and Insert Variable buttons! If we provide the ability to use your own preferred solution instead of the one we provide out-of-the-box, you will have to add these buttons yourself.

In general, opinions on which editor to use differ a lot. Some people say - get rid of TinyMCE, some people argue for the Redaktor, some like markdown, some like CKEditor. We are still thinking on the best choice for all of us.

Thanks for your opinions and please continue discussion in this thread! We are listening carefully.

[phazei]

Whatever is chosen, it should provide clean markup when the editor is turned off. Currently it all gets clumped up and becomes difficult to read.

That's a big reason I suggested CKEditor, clean indented source. I actually use the demo on their page quite often as a utility, take some messed up source, paste it into their source page, then toggle the source button off/on, and it's cleaned up. I've actually been doing that a lot lately when needing to edit the source in tinyMCE.

It also has a button for clear styling which is very useful at times to strip out all the styling tags. Also, it's source button lets you edit in the same box instead of a popup which can be used full screen.

Edit: CKEditor also has a huge plugin library, and even a plugin for syntax highlighting.

[verklov]

Thanks for your comments, @phazei! What if we provide some editor out-of-the-box, but you will be able to turn it off and plug in CKEditor? I know it is preferable for you to have CKEditor out-of-the-box, but if you had a relatively simple way of replacing the default editor with the one of your choice, would that be sufficient? We previously gathered opinions on the editor of choice, but had lots of different options with no strong preference.

[phazei]

That would work for me. Currently it's a bit messy to replace it. One of the things I wouldn't want to lose would be the magento widget tools, which shouldn't be hard to integrate into CKE, it supports pretty much everything MCE does.

Though it might not be a bad idea to gather a pros/cons between the two. Don't want plain familiarity to hold back forward progress.

[justinpage]

@verklov @phazei @tzyganu Pasting and editing code snippets inside the admin panel feels unnatural. A simple text box that persists the information you paste in. Sure it offers parsing and other core interpretation features, but wouldn't it be nice if we could paste and edit our code snippets in a manner that felt more familiar?

Could we differentiate between plain text/markdown and that of actual code snippets. More specifically, offer the ability to have input fields that are dedicated to plain text whereas others code. Sure any editor may offer text editing, but stylized code syntax is unique. Something like Code Mirror or Google Code Prettify.

I would love an end-goal of something that feels more natural for developers. I feel like offering a single dedicated text area for both code and plain text leads to issues in finding a bridge between the two different needs.

[verklov]

Thank you all for your thoughts! Please continue commenting on this as you encounter new ideas. Meanwhile we close this ticket, but continue watching it and taking all your suggestions into consideration.

[phazei]

@KLVTZ
Actually CKeditor supports Code Mirror:
http://ckeditor.com/addon/codemirror
which is pretty slick.

[justinpage]

@phazei +1 on that! Thanks for pointing that out, that would feel 10x more natural.
It comes to my attention that maybe we as a community should encourage proper extended code base additions versus just code injections that magento 2 offers in the admin-panel.

[Frits1980]

Ok, nice, we all agree. But what is the next step to make this happen? Can I do something to make this happen?

[magento-team]

Internal ticket to track issue progress: MAGETWO-69234