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requests-topic
3 items: Post Preview, Optional Post Edited note, better Script tag handling
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adew
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Jan 17, 2010 - 11:23 am

Hi,

As much as I love SPF, I do find three areas particularly irritating/missing:

1. Post Preview - that would be very cool.

2. Make "Post Edited" messages optional. Currently, each time a post is edited a "Post edited by" message is pinned to the top of the post. My preference is for replacing this list with a simple "Post last edited by" message so that only the last edit message is viewable, coupled with the ability to add an optional "Reason for editing".

3. Script tags improvements. Unfortunately, I find this currently a little flaky, due to the automated markup which is very sensitive to the source of where the code has been pasted from. I end up spending a fair bit of time having to re-edit, sometimes using the HTML editor, to get the display right.I think phpBB and vBulletin handle script/code display more effectively.

Having said all that, I do love this plugin, I recommend it to many people, and appreciate the work that goes into this. 🙂

 

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Mr Papa
Simi Valley, CA
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Jan 17, 2010 - 11:35 am

1) if you are using tinymce (rts) as your editor, there is already a preview button.

2) post edited message is entirely optional. set it on forum - options - topic settings

3) what do you mean by script tags improvements? do you mean pasting things from MS Word (God forbid given all the crap they add)? there are paste from words and paste plain text to remove extra formatting

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adew
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Jan 17, 2010 - 3:49 pm

1. tinyMCE - I should spend more time reading the docs. lol

2. ditto. However, a "Reason for Edit" box would be nice.

3. No, I'm not talking about pasting from Word. Here's an example: Start a topic, write a post and paste in some lines of code from, say, the browser Page Source of something. Save the post. Then go back and Edit the post and apply the tinyMCE script button to the "unformatted" code entered previously. 9 times out of 10 it won't format properly - usually because the saving of the original post has added paragraph tags or line breaks to the "unformatted" code. I also find that there are times when the Script button fails to wrap the code. The point of discussing this was not to suggest there's a bug, rather that the behaviour of the Script button is not as predictable as its equivalent in forum software like phpBB and vB - hence the suggestion to see how the current functionality can be improved.

 

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Mr Papa
Simi Valley, CA
SP Master
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Jan 17, 2010 - 3:58 pm

always looking to improve, and 4.2 does improve the display filters... have to see if we have any way to strip formatting automatically when the code button is pressed...

on the reason for edit box, what would you propose to do with the entered response?

but for the case you mentioned, the paste plain text button with strip that extra formatting... extra step, but decent workaround for now...

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Mr Papa
Simi Valley, CA
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Jan 17, 2010 - 4:11 pm

ya know... actually, I dont think the plain text post will work - likely would strip any tags you might have in your code section beside the unwanted, copied tags...

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Yellow Swordfish
Glinton, England
SP Master
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Jan 17, 2010 - 7:00 pm

TinyMCE doesn't actually provide a 'code' formatter. This button was written by a user for their own forum and passed to us for use. And yo are right - you really do need to select and format on the initial post. Something we need to improve on.

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YELLOW
SWORDFISH
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spork
Member
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Jan 27, 2010 - 4:38 pm

Mr Papa said:

on the reason for edit box, what would you propose to do with the entered response?


 

Usually it gets displayed along with the "Edited by..." box. It's usually used by administrators to remind others why a post was edited. Example: "too much swearing", "excessively personal attack", "unforgivably blatant stupidity".

It's not very important, but can be nice.

As far as Post Preview, that's been covered in another thread, but it's a useful feature: popping up the first few lines of a post when moused over the subject helps a lot when deciding whether to click on posts titled something unhelpful like "Everyone Read This!" or "Have you ever wondered..."

 

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