A better rich text editor for Open Laszlo 4
That headline got you interested, right? "Finally, they've implemented a better rich text editor!" Sorry, but no... we want you to implement a better rich text editor.
Open Laszlo 3.4 has a rich text editor, but it's not very good. It's inherently limited by Flash Player 7's support for rich text, which seems to have been designed to display rich text, not to support interactive text format editing. With the DHTML runtime for Open Laszlo 4, we're free of the constraints of the Flash player(s), and into a whole new frying pan: the constraints of the browsers. There are lots of other projects which work in that particular frying pan; in particular, other development efforts have already written javascript-based rich text editors. (TinyMCE from moxiecode comes to mind.) Some of these are free, open, and cross-browser-capable. Combine one of those with the Open Laszlo <html> tag, and we could finally have a good rich text editor in Open Laszlo.
This is a good place for a community contributor; could you integrate an existing DHTML rich text editor into the Open Laszlo 4 platform?
To do this, you'd have to learn some cool new tricks, which haven't been documented much yet: the <switch> tag, the #pragma compiler hint mechanism, the runtime-specific compile-time constants, and probably some stuff we haven't figured out how to do yet, like including a third-party library. You'd help us design and develop the platform support that developers will need to integrate a third-party javascript library, and you'd implement the first dhtml-specific extension. And you could choose which third-party editor to integrate.
Anybody interested? Write to me: ben at laszlosystems dot com.
July 3rd, 2007 at 2:57 am
Hi Ben,
I’m particularly interested into this issue. I have integrated tinymce into my own project, which I plan to announce next week, along with an online demo. There’s a trac project at http://trac.palacehotel.org/. It’s a fairly big project, and lzx is the language with which I spend most of my time.
The integration is far from being finished; at the moment there are different glitches on all platforms, which is a major hindrance on the path to version 1.0.
The editor part is indeed a major component for my project (which includes a webmail), so I would be glad to collaborate with anyone who’s commited to resolve these issues!
July 18th, 2007 at 9:49 am
I encourage you to also take a look at using Kupu as your RichText editor:
http://kupu.oscom.org/
Some info on the latest release of Kupu v1.4:
…Kupu packs in a lot of improvements. All of the changes in Kupu could fill up an article on its own, but the highlights surely include:
* Named anchors
* Automatic image resizing
* Image captions
* Inserting of Flash and other embeddable video (e.g. YouTube)
* Span/character styles
Together with all of Kupu’s existing goodness, most emphatically including its ability to produce valid XHTML code, … defines “best of breedâ€? for graphical HTML editing in a CMS.
Here are a few screenshots of Kupu in action, to whet your appetite. Click on each image to see the full-size view. …
Full article, with screen shots: http://blogs.onenw.org/jon/archives/2007/07/16/8-really-cool-things-about-plone-3/
July 27th, 2007 at 6:29 am
open lazlo is having very good Look&Feel.