Module Adminbar

[apeisa]

Ok, now that files are flying like flies (heh heh), I think I will focus to next version of AdminBar, but will also try to implement Aloha Editor module.

I will start from Ryan's code and concept above. Idea is that Aloha Editor would play nice with or without AdminBar. If you have AB installed, then it would use the same UI.

[apeisa]

Current dev version of AdminBar gives a nasty js alert on IE9 (not sure about earlier ones): "Load jQuery first!". It happens occasionally when clicking "Edit page" link. Not everytime, but about 50% of times.

It comes from tiny_mce.js file. I changed that part from:

return alert("Load jQuery first!");

to

return false;

and everything seems to be running smoothly. I assume that jQuery is needed for those link & image modals? If so, then silent fail here should be ok, since it won't take long that jQuery gets loaded (those works in my tests even when I get the alert). IE9 seems to have many bugs related to how it loads javascript files, and this is probably just one of those. Whatever the reason is, it seems that occasionally in IE9 and using Adminbar, tinymce gets loaded before jQuery.

In the other news: for some reason removing pages from AdminBar works now (I haven't done anything, and it didn't work in 2.0). It redirects to /processwire/ after deleting (I think that is good solution here).

[Frank Vèssia]

mmm...i'm trying to use this adminbar but when editing a page i get this error:

Template '/home/processw/public_html/site/templates/' is not allowed

If i edit the page via admin it works.  :-\

[apeisa]

Sevarf: current situation is little bit messy. This should work in 2.1: https://github.com/apeisa/AdminBar/tree/AdminBarNew and the master branch in 2.0. If you are using the "AdminBarNew" and 2.1 then there are some new issues.

[apeisa]

Ryan, I took your code and started taking it further. It is very good start and not much to do really. I have Aloha editor floating around my content already and I am starting to implement the saving.

<?php

    public function format(&$str) {
        if(!$this->page->editable()) return;
        $str = "<div id='fieldname' class='aloha-editable'>$str</div>";        
    }

Is there any easy way to get that id='fieldname' to textformatter? So does the textformatter know what is the field name that uses it? Fieldname is something that I wanna know, when I save the edited content, isn't it?

PS: testing this made me think that there probably will be some issues using Aloha on front and TinyMCE on the back. Not sure though? If they both provide clean enough output, then it will work. Need to test this well after this is ready.

PPS: http://drupal.org/node/1018352 (it seems to be much harder to implement on drupal - not a surprise though, but interesting read)

[apeisa]

Played more with Aloha:

• Since Aloha makes only one instance for multiple editables (which is great for performance), it makes this harder to implement. We need to strip functionality based on what kind of field is edited (textarea or just text). We don't want to allow adding headers inside of header etc. There probably are methods on Aloha API that let us do that. If not, then we have to live with it or just use very bare bones version of Aloha (inline elements only).
  
• Editing feels very fast and natural. Now I want to also drop images to the website
  
• I already implemented this to play nicely with AdminBar - it adds new button to Adminbar, if you have it installed (Quick Edit). And after you start editing content, there appears second new button: "Save Aloha" which gives you a nice little alert with all the editable content.
  

[ryan]

Is there any easy way to get that id='fieldname' to textformatter? So does the textformatter know what is the field name that uses it? Fieldname is something that I wanna know, when I save the edited content, isn't it?

I've just depreciated the Textformatter::format($str) function in favor of Textformatter::formatValue(Page $page, Field $field, $value). I guess I didn't consider the things we'd be using Textformatter for in the future. But it should be ready to go now. Just grab the latest commit and implement the 'formatValue' version rather than the 'format' version in your Textformatter module. You can now get the field name from $field->name.

Since Aloha makes only one instance for multiple editables (which is great for performance), it makes this harder to implement. We need to strip functionality based on what kind of field is edited (textarea or just text). We don't want to allow adding headers inside of header etc. There probably are methods on Aloha API that let us do that. If not, then we have to live with it or just use very bare bones version of Aloha (inline elements only).

I see what you mean, though am surprised they don't provide built in capability to deal with single-line (titles) vs multi-line (textareas) markup. We could always strip paragraph and heading tags from the single line fields.

PS: testing this made me think that there probably will be some issues using Aloha on front and TinyMCE on the back. Not sure though? If they both provide clean enough output, then it will work. Need to test this well after this is ready.

So long as they are both dealing with the same kind of markup tags, I think we'll be fine here. Though not positive.

I'm excited to see how this goes!

Thanks,

Ryan

[apeisa]

Ryan, thanks for the commit, will implement this further soon.

Title fields - I was too pessimistic, even one of their examples have different options for title: http://aloha-editor.org/demos/3col/

[ryan]

Title fields - I was too pessimistic, even one of their examples have different options for title

Not sure I understand? Looks like this is one giant field to cover the entire page. Pretty impressive with the 3 columns actually. That's not something I'm used to seeing in HTML. Definitely not something I've seen in TinyMCE. This 1-giant-field for the entire page is probably not something you'd see much of in the real world, beyond a demo.

Aloha seems pretty useful even if just used for multiline fields. Though it'd be great if it had some option to place limits on the markup a user can use, for single line fields at least. But I don't see anything like that, looking through their site. We can always just strip the block-level stuff.

[apeisa]

If you click the big "Moby Dick" header, then you can only add links, not change formatting at all. Exactly what we want to do with headers (probably many times want to disable links too...).

The 3 columns is simple stuff, using vendor specific css:

-webkit-column-width: 300px;
-webkit-column-gap: 30px;
-moz-column-width: 300px;
-moz-column-gap: 30px;
width: 960px;

[ryan]

If you click the big "Moby Dick" header, then you can only add links, not change formatting at all. Exactly what we want to do with headers (probably many times want to disable links too...).

Pretty cool!  Somehow I completely missed that, thinking it was a background image or something.

The 3 columns is simple stuff, using vendor specific css:

Nice, I've not experimented with the multi-column stuff... looks interesting.

[apeisa]

Just realized that aloha.js is almost 1 meg javascript minified... it has jquery build in, but also ExtJS. That does complicates things (I had this first loading in admin also, and earlier version (I assume) of jQuery was messing things up...). It would be real problem on front end to make sure that your site jQuery or ExtJS (if you use either one) is always the same version than Aloha requires... There was aloha-nodeps.js included, but need to add ExtJS and jQuery separately then. It just feels damn bloated for such a "small" functionality (I really want to have quick edits and save).

This made me thinking of building super simple editor by myself (there is nice html5 API for that too). Or might add some other light weight editor (I don't consider aloha a light weight anymore)... Not sure though and will definitely take Aloha further and test it more (make it save stuff).

What do you guys think? What are the features you are expecting from "quick editing"? Just editing text & save? Strong, italics? Headers? Links? Images?

[Soma]

Just realized that aloha.js is almost 1 meg javascript minified... it has jquery build in, but also ExtJS. That does complicates things (I had this first loading in admin also, and earlier version (I assume) of jQuery was messing things up...). It would be real problem on front end to make sure that your site jQuery or ExtJS (if you use either one) is always the same version than Aloha requires... There was aloha-nodeps.js included, but need to add ExtJS and jQuery separately then. It just feels damn bloated for such a "small" functionality (I really want to have quick edits and save).

I also was shocked about the 1meg. Quite a bummer. ExtJS alone is beyond imaginable, and that just for quick edits. Let alone the complications that can occur. Well it would be possible to run your site jQuery in a seperate namespace and make sure your JQ loads before Aloha ones... headache granted – Well in first place I was also thinking about doing something simple self brewn, that fits into PW. Just discovered Aloha few days ago. I thought it may usable but also sensed it may overkill and too akward to implement, use. Not to mention depend on it.

This made me thinking of building super simple editor by myself (there is nice html5 API for that too). Or might add some other light weight editor (I don't consider aloha a light weight anymore)... Not sure though and will definitely take Aloha further and test it more (make it save stuff).

What do you guys think? What are the features you are expecting from "quick editing"? Just editing text & save? Strong, italics? Headers? Links? Images?

Yeah images would be extasic.

Lists? Small? Paragraph?

Are you planning writing a wysiwyg in this case? Or using tinymce?

Also what are you seeing will be the way to define what fields are editable on page? Something that's controlled in by the template file would be cool.

BTW: I already hear a "Oooooh! my text is screwed, I copied from Word into the page!"

[apeisa]

I spend few hours last night to read about contenteditable and how to implement simple js rich text editor. It sounds simple (browsers have it built in, since IE 5.5 - then reverse engineered from there to other browsers). But (and pretty big but) - the implementation is very messy. Gotta respect TinyMCE & Co more, that is actually super messy stuff that different browsers provide (I tested just chrome, ff and opera) and amazed that there has been so little progress on that area. This being said I don't think I have time (or skills) to build solid rt-editor from scratch.

I started to look if there is any library that can clean the html (I found some stuff to clean word pasting) that different browsers provide and make them similar in each, but no luck there. Maybe I could loan some parts from other projects (if their licencing allows) if it possible. Not sure though.

If someone finds simple editor, that provides about the same markup and can be added to any element (not just textarea), that would be great. If not, I probably continue with Aloha and try to do my best with multiple jQuery versions.

[ryan]

Just realized that aloha.js is almost 1 meg javascript minified... it has jquery build in, but also ExtJS.

Wow that's surprising... rather bloated for what it does. On the other hand, every one of their demos has loaded fast and I would have never guessed about the file size. So maybe it's not the issue that it appears to be at first, given that it's for admin rather than public users. I'm just thankful for browser JS caching.

When it gets down to it, all web-based rich text editors seem problematic for one reason or another. It's always a compromise… just the nature of the beast I guess.

[apeisa]

Yep. After reading more about how contentEditable/designMode work (most of the editors use designMode - textarea goes into iframe) and how buggy the support is, then it is not surprise that there are so much issues. Add in tons of features, many different use cases (copy from word, from another website, undo button etc), normal browser rendering differencies, then it will be clear that it's not a simple case. And aloha-editor does use contentEditable instead of designMode, which seems to be even more buggier.

But it seems that Aloha is the best (only inline editor?) there is currently so I will continue with that.

[apeisa]

Well, this is interesting: http://jejacks0n.github.com/mercury/

[ryan]

It does look interesting–good find. I couldn't get their demo to work (in the latest Chrome, other than the nav bar at the top), but am curious about it. Have you tried it out or had any luck getting it to work?

[apeisa]

It does work. Not the whole page is editable, only left sidebar and bottom at the middle column. Editable areas have blue outlines.

[ryan]

Strangely I couldn't get it to work before (must have been something up with my browser). It works great now. Seems like quite a nice solution they've got here. What's your opinion of this vs. Aloha?

[apeisa]

Not sure yet. After playing a while with Aloha the floating bar starts to annoy a little. The more I use the more I wish it wouldn't float. It's true that you can lock the aloha position, but you would do that always depending on the placement. "Always on top" feels more solid and it is what we (and our clients) have used to. Word doesn't have anything floating around.

This is just a gut feeling, but Mercury also feels like better coded, and better documented (not much, but there is nice annotated source: http://jejacks0n.github.com/mercury/annotated_source/mercury.html) it has cleaner licencing and uses only jQuery (where aloha uses jQuery & ExtJS). So far it feels like Mercury would be better, but it is more just a feeling than anything. I really need to dive deeper to know which one suits better.

[Soma]

I'm on the same wavelength. I already after 1 minute of aloha, thought the floating thing is annoying... I really like the top bar of mercury. I would chose it. Just my 2 cents.

[ryan]

I agree. I think Aloha is being marketed better, but Mercury seems like the better product based on my relatively brief experience with them. Though Aloha's massive size weighs heavily on my impression too.

[apeisa]

Few minor additions to AdminBarNew (I will soon switch that as a master and leave 2.0 adminbar as a legacy branch):

• Only show add page button when adding pages is allowed (thanks Soma!)
  
• Show lock icon with description text when editing is not allowed or page is locked - instead of hiding the bar totally
  
• Added js files to bottom instead of head - will work even if you load your jQuery at bottom (and you might wanna do that for performance reasons)
  

[apeisa]

Added "adminbar" permission (other roles than superuser needs that, otherwise they won't see adminbar).

If anyone got the last version, you might wanna update. Just realized that it probably did show adminbar for everyone (guests too).

This (AdminBarNew branch) feels pretty stable now, but please report any issues to GitHub or here. I wanna keep this as slim as possible. Probably only new feature that I will add is logout-button that Soma suggested at GitHub. While testing aloha editor I realized that it is super simple to extend adminbar from additional modules, so that is the way I take with new ideas (and hopely others want to extend AdminBar too).