topic Re: Inline editing disabled? in Alfresco Archive

Inline editing disabled?

sacco — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 07:48:42 GMT

Is there some reason why, under Web Projects HTML content can be created using the inline editor, butcannot subsequently be edited inline?Is this intentional behaviour?

Re: Inline editing disabled?

kevinr — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 10:59:06 GMT

Yes - it is assumed that for "real" websites you are going to have your own editor (say Dreamweaver or similar) rather than the limited capabilities of the TinyMCE pluging - which also has an annoying habit of modifying your HTML, which is not good.

Thanks,

Kevin

Re: Inline editing disabled?

sacco — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 13:09:20 GMT

Yes - it is assumed that for "real" websites you are going to have your own editor (say Dreamweaver or similar) rather than the limited capabilities of the TinyMCE pluging - which also has an annoying habit of modifying your HTML, which is not good.

Thanks for the quick reply, Kevin. That makes sense.

When you say that it modifies the HTML, are you referring to the
'cleaning-up' that it attempts, or does it do something more devious
that I haven't noticed yet?

Re: Inline editing disabled?

kvc — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:06:54 GMT

Sacco:

Yes, though I hestitate to call it "cleaning-up". It's more like sterilizing. It will strip out things like your <META> tags, any Javascripting, includes, etc. Any reasonably well-designed, rich web page gets basically trashed. Really, TinyMCE is good for fragments which may or may not get sourced into a section of an overall web page … but a full web editor it is not.

Try some experiments. We did originally have this enabled. But we had many many people import HTML sites and use TinyMCE as an editor and trash their web pages (luckily they could preview and undo!) that it was just causing too much consternation and confusion. We'd rather prevent you from making errors!

Kevin

Re: Inline editing disabled?

sacco — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:23:38 GMT

Yes, though I hestitate to call it "cleaning-up". It's more like sterilizing.
It will strip out things like your <META> tags, any Javascripting, includes, etc.

Sure. I just used 'cleaning-up' because it's how TinyMCE describes it.

Any reasonably well-designed, rich web page gets basically trashed.

True, though, to be fair, I wouldn't suggest that a tool of this sort
be used to edit a rich web-page.

Really, TinyMCE is good for fragments which may or may not get
sourced into a section of an overall web page … but a full web editor it is not.

Quite.

My ideal for a WCM system is to have some kind of overall
site framework within which contributors can create content
by entering XML fragments for the 'body' and meta-data via a
form (or can import it all wrapped up together in XML).
The XML can then obviously be (often trivially) transformed
into XHTML and integrated into a page template together with its
metadata.

I was asking whether TinyMCE is doing 'something more devious'
to try to assess how useful it may be in this rÃƒÂ´le, as I haven't really
used it that much: I prefer BXE (which seems to give far better
control over the XML, but sadly is Mozilla-specific) or sometimes
kupu (most browsers except Safari). kupu is much less flexible
than BXE, but produces XHTML which is usually enough and doesn't
cause much work to extract the info desired, so except for being
non-Safari, kupu is more widely useful I suppose (and TinyMCE is
not great either in Safari).

I believe TinyMCE's vandalism can be configured, but I don't really
like its approach (very clunky compared to BXE, which uses
schemas & CSS), and changing from the built-in config seemed to
have fairly dire consequences for performance when I experimented
with it (but this was a while ago, so things may have changed),
so perhaps this configuration wouldn't be such a great help.

Re: Inline editing disabled?

mhanisch — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 01:06:51 GMT

I don't know if anyone is still following this old thread, but maybe others are still interested in this topic…

My use case is maintaining a collection of HTML page fragments w/ minimum effort,
so a WYSIWYG editor like TinyMCE is the way to go.
I know I could define a simple web form for these fragments with, say, one field only, but doing
so means that I carry an extra overhead: storing the XML documents I don't need, and doing simple transformations each
time I edit. However, the main problem for me is the fact that suddenly all my content is in XML rather than
HTML, meaning the users can no longer use their "usual" tools to modify it.

Ideally, I would just use "create web content" w/ content type set to HTML, then use the WYSIWYG editor to
add and edit the content inline and be done. For the more complex cases, the users would still be able to
download and modify the HTML fragment with their editor of choice, rather than forcing them to use the
web client as is the case with web forms. Yes, going back and forth between the inline editor and a "real" external editor
might screw up the markup, but that's something the users should decide - at least in my case, convenience is more
important than "leading people on the right path".

Basically, I want this to work the same way in WCM as it does in the ECM part, where e.g. text/html
content can both be created as well as edited using the built-in TinyMCE.
I understand that it's debatable if this should be working out of the box, but at least this behavior should be
- easy to change
- well-documented.

Re: Inline editing disabled?

scottf — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:26:37 GMT

I don't know if anyone is still following this old thread, but maybe others are still interested in this topic…

My use case is maintaining a collection of HTML page fragments w/ minimum effort,
so a WYSIWYG editor like TinyMCE is the way to go.
I know I could define a simple web form for these fragments with, say, one field only, but doing
so means that I carry an extra overhead: storing the XML documents I don't need, and doing simple transformations each
time I edit. However, the main problem for me is the fact that suddenly all my content is in XML rather than
HTML, meaning the users can no longer use their "usual" tools to modify it.

Ideally, I would just use "create web content" w/ content type set to HTML, then use the WYSIWYG editor to
add and edit the content inline and be done. For the more complex cases, the users would still be able to
download and modify the HTML fragment with their editor of choice, rather than forcing them to use the
web client as is the case with web forms. Yes, going back and forth between the inline editor and a "real" external editor
might screw up the markup, but that's something the users should decide - at least in my case, convenience is more
important than "leading people on the right path".

Basically, I want this to work the same way in WCM as it does in the ECM part, where e.g. text/html
content can both be created as well as edited using the built-in TinyMCE.
I understand that it's debatable if this should be working out of the box, but at least this behavior should be
- easy to change
- well-documented.

Has any progress been made in this area lately?