2009/04/14

Write Area 0.8.0 released

If you have installed WriteArea then soon you'll get the updated version.

It finally adds tooltips for the toolbar buttons, and two new buttons besides the "save" button.

The first one allows to save the current content to a file in your computer, great if you want to keep drafts of any kind of templates around. The second button is obviously the one to load those files, the icons might not fit exactly with the rest but I'm not a designer and I always rather focus on the most important things.

Now that CKEditor 3 is getting closer everyday I don't know if next update will be based still on the 2.6 line of FCKeditor, or if it will start using that fresh new code. Some of the advantages of the new code doesn't apply the same way inside chrome than it does in a website, but on the other side it might open new opportunities, they might need some time to check and test the ideas so such future update might get delayed quite a while.

There are other ideas for the current code, but they also take time, I wish that there would be a way to code everything that goes through my mind.

17 comments:

Kevin Ashton said...

The tool tips are a welcome addition to Write Area! Out of

Anonymous said...

I don't know why my reply hasn't been shown here.
As a general advice, it's better to post anything in my blog as I get a notice whenever a comment is added.

You can use small and other tags with the style menu. Can you explain what do you mean with "different tag with the same function".

replacing the content of a page is quite difficult, so it's not one of my priorities at the moment.
Thanks for you command. I have found the small tag indeed.

For instead the colour tag. this is the only colour tag that works on some old forums.
{font color="#0080ff"}

This is the tag, with the same function, that won't works
{span style="color: rgb(255, 102, 0);"}



The baground color that will works
{td bgcolor="#D5FFFF"}


and this is the tag that won't work
{span style="background-color: rgb(0, 204, 255);"}

XN

Alfonso said...

I could add a preference to use font instead of span for the color, but I don't think that it can work the same way for the background.

A td is a table cell, so it's not just changing the generated element for the background using td instead of span because that would be illegal and would break anything.

If you want to put background color for cells you can already do it, just select the color in the cell properties dialog.

Hari said...

I am thoroughly enjoying the Write Area over a crappy native editor, and would like to thank you for creating it. If you have plans to make further improvements, I would appreciate if you can consider the below enhancements:
- An option to "Save and Continue" (that is Save without actually closing the window). This is useful to periodically copy the work over into the original textbox and save as draft. This should also help provide a better assurance of session restore restoring the unsaved work in case of a crash.
- Tab and Shift+Tab to indent and deindent.
- A bottom pane mode like how Firebug does, in addition to the current mode of creating a new window. This will reduce the clutter and make it easier to work with multiple edits at the same time. The pane should be made local to the tab such that it will not be visible when viewed from a different tab.

Alfonso said...

Hi Irha.

I'm glad that you enjoy it.

I have thought about adding an autosave feature, so that every 5 or 10 minutes it sends the current content to the textarea and that way it can be saved by the existing system logic. Adding another "save" button might be too much :-)

Tab and Tab+Shift must be handled directly by the editor, this is the ticket that discusses it: http://dev.fckeditor.net/ticket/979 (don't spam it please, but patches are welcome)

And using a bottom pane is another idea that I have in mind. Certainly I don't like too much to have a popup for the editor.

Oren Shani said...

I like this plugin very much. I used to use xhena, but this is better.

I have a question though: As you know, there is an FckEditor extension for Mediawiki, so I wonder if the FF plugin could be configured to filter meta-wiki markup and not just HTML. This could solve a long and hard dispute about weather and how WYSIWYG editors should be used with Mediawikis... tnx, Oren

Alfonso said...

Hi Oren

The problem with the MediaWiki plugin is that it isn't just some javascript, it does include some php modifications, so I can't include it just because of that.

If someone can provide a plugin that takes care of it just in javascript then I'll be pleased to include it ASAP. Same applies for BBCode (there's a basic plugin for this, but it might need some extra work)

Marco.... said...

I tryed to use Write Area on this FF3.5.2 Version:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2 ID:20090729225027

with no other extension added

but first FF tell me that it is incompatible and i dont know why if on the addon page:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6147

is writed that it is compatible.

and the most important when i force install , it does not work att all.
i do not see button or toolbar or other stuff that make me work with Write Area ....
any suggestion????

Marco.... said...

can you please tell me what java machine is best for this application....

i am trying maybe is the Java ,
i have Java Sun the last version..
thanks

Alfonso said...

The current version should install in Firefox 3.5.2 without any problem.

If you can't then either there's something wrong going on with the AddOns site, or in your Firefox.

The extension doesn't use Java at all. It doesn't matter if you have installed it or it is one version or another. It's all plain javascript.

And as explained in the page, the way to use it is to launch it from the context menu. It isn't a button in the toolbar because if there are several textareas in the page it would be more complex to find out which one to use.

Anonymous said...

Hello,

is it possible to make Write Area automatically adding a tag at the beginning of the textarea-field?

Alfonso said...

I'm sorry but I don't understand the question.

As a last resort you can always edit the code of the extension (remember that a .xpi is just a .zip renamed)

Unknown said...

Hello,

thank you for the answer. I always need the Code <de_cms_wysiwyg> in front of the Text I create with Write Area 0.8.0. So when I type the Text "Hello, I am happy" within Write Area 0.8.0, it should output "<de_cms_wysiwyg>Hello, I am happy". Is this possible?

Thanks, Pascal

Alfonso said...

That's not a standard tag, so the chances of adding it in the normal release are close to 0.
You'll need to modify the code or add it manually to the textarea.

pulsar said...

real look for seamonkey realise?!

Unknown said...

Can you tell me, where I have to add it? I don't find the point where the script writes the code into the textarea, when you click "save".

Alfonso said...

@Pascal

If you go to the extension folder you'll find the chrome folder with a writearea.jar

Open it (it's a zip) and there's a content folder open the editor.html file and modify the UpdateContent function according to your needs.