The latest update to Discourse has added a new feature - a “rich text” editor - what we used to call a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get). When you’re creating a posting, you turn it on by clicking on the little “M+” in the upper left corner of the editing box. You can switch back again by clicking on the “A” that now appears there.
From the announcement, it provides:
Support for advanced features like creating tables, creating polls, inserting date/time, adding hide details sections, adding blur spoiler sections, uploading file / image / video, rendering links as oneboxes, styling category / tag / user mentions, quoting content, and inserting footnotes.
Dedicated link UI to visit, edit, copy, title, or remove links
So then people could use this to compose more sophisticated messages about their how-to projects. And then they could go into the Wiki section all glossy formatted and everything? That would be pretty slick. Makes me feel really guilty because I never wrote up my mast/fairlead/tack-collar experiences like Bob asked me to. It’s really hard to force myself to go back and redo it all, especially since I wasn’t thinking about documenting it as I was doing it. But if I had been able to write my original posting with these tools and as a Wiki from the start, it might already be out there.
So when are they going to have a sandbox so we can take our time composing these things and then make them public when finished?
I tried clicking to “A” mode, but I do not get a WYSIWYG display. The M+ mode already gave a preview. Was the new feature turned on in your Admin settings? That article says you need to turn it on for the group before it will work.
I tried pasting in the following, but the horizontal line is very faint and the red text is missing. I’d be interested to learn how to make WYSIWYG mode work.
<hr>
<H2 style="color:red;">Wiki article under construction</h2>
<p> Please allow the creator to work on this as they are able. You are free to offer help or advice by replying, but please do not edit it without permission.</p>
<hr>
It looks like this when you paste it in directly. Copy the code from the previous posting and paste into an HTML previewer to see what it should look like.
Wiki article under construction
Please allow the creator to work on this as they are able. You are free to offer help or advice by replying, but please do not edit it without permission.
Brian, I guess I wasn’t clear. Click on the M+ and you are in WYSIWYG mode. Click on the A to get out of it.
There are a couple of different approached we can take -
we can set up a category for work in progress, and I believe restrict what people can do
we can set up a projects category and let that topic collect everything, and then generate a summary, tweak it, put that in the wiki with a link back to the full posting
create a copy of the posting as a starting point, and restrict that to “reviewers”
This needs a review of what Discourse can do and some discussion.
= = = = = quick update
Something to try:
Scroll to the bottom of a topic, after the last posting. There is a row of tools in little boxes. Click on the wrench. From that list, click on UNLIST. That pretty much restricts access and visibility to the author.
Actually, you were clear. But I’m telling you what actually happens when I do it.
When I first hit reply I am in the “M+” mode. That might not be what they call it, but the M+ and the A are unlabeled and undefined and have no meaning to me. I see the “M+” so I called it “M+” mode. And that’s the mode I am in when I hit reply. And there is a preview pane off to the right side, next to the composition pane.
If I hit the “M+” button it switches to “A”, which I called “A” mode because I don’t know what else to call it. I’m not going to call it WYSIWYG mode because there is no WYSIWYG pane anywhere to be seen. And in fact, when I enter this mode the preview pane disappears entirely.
If you are able to switch to WYSIWYG mode, I would be interested to know your secret.
I see Share, Bookmark, Flag, Reply, Tracking. None has a wrench. I suspect you have some admin privileges which I do not.
That UNLIST mode does seem like exactly the right way to do it because, regarding your list of approaches, I think anything that requires authors or admins to do extra work is likely to fall apart in the long run. I think simple is better. While you admins might need to move something into the Wiki or convert something to a Wiki from time to time, I think the best thing is for someone doing a writeup to do it right in the Wiki section with the UNLIST setting turned on until they have completed it. Less work for you, less confusion, and it kind of puts the author in the right frame of mind.
So let’s test it out: I’ll start a thread in the Wiki section and pad it with some verbiage. You go see if you can set the UNLIST mode and then I’ll see if I can still edit it. That OK with you?
I have posted a question about rendering html to the support site as a reply to the announcement of the new editor. It seems that if they want to make it WYSIWYG they have to have a way of letting you see the html text and how it is rendered.
For now, you will need to drop out of the one panel WYSIWYG editor and back into the two panel markdown text on the left and rendered text on the right to see how the html is going to look.