The other day I was talking about upgrading Typo. The update itself went well, true, and the site was up and running without too much downtime, but then I started using it again… and I have noticed two things so far (both about writing posts) that I really dislike:
First, the good old editor is not there anymore: the Typo editor used to be really good, because on the left hand side you had a very reliable and easy to use textarea with Wiki syntax (you can choose which exact syntax you want), and on the right hand side you had a “live preview” of your post, automatically updated with Ajax, that showed you how the post was going to look like. Well, that’s gone. Now there are two options: some retarded WYSIWYG box, that I tried to use and failed, and some good old textarea… without the damn live preview. That sucks big time, because there is no other preview (that I have seen: please enlighten me if there is indeed one), so I just blindly write things in a Wiki format, and hope that it’s going to look OK when I press “Publish”.
Second, I was playing with the Wiki format for the articles, and I changed it to “Markdown” (I always mix “Textile” with “Markdown”, and never remember which is which; the one I prefer is Textile). After I hit “Save”, not only the next article was parsed in Markdown format by default, but every single blog post. It’s like, you select the parser the system is going to use to interpret your whole blog. How retarded is that? Once you have written posts, it doesn’t make sense to change their syntax (unless you do it manually editing the post itself). Clearly the format is a property of each blog post, not of the whole blog installation.
Not everything is bad though: it seems that now you finally have a “Draft” concept, so I can start writing a blog post and just save as a draft, instead of unticking the “Online” property and saving as a normal post. Also, the drafts are saved automatically, so I don’t have to remember to hit “Save” from time to time just in case the browser crashes or I hit something stupid and erase the contents of the post. Yay for that.
Posts
Handmade trackback :
I also got some problems with the text filters.
http://harryseldon.thinkosphere.com/2008/11/30/
November 30, 2008 @ 7:14 pm
Hi,
I’m the retard who dropped the live preview. There are a few reasons why I did that, and trust me, they are actually good reasons.
. What happened when you used the live preview? Everytime you type 2 or 3 keys, don’t remember, an Ajax request was sent to the server, and Typo would generate a complete article, then display it. It did nothing but put serious servers on their knees, having Typo generating error 500 on many shared hosting. The final consequence was brocken, on even banned Typos on these platforms, and users could not determine why things were sucking that much (even happened to one of my ex co mainteners who dropped Typo for Wordpress because of it).
. Live preview was using Azure’s stylesheet, which means it only rendered posts the way they would look when using Azure. Except to check whether or not your Textile / Markdown would render correctly, it was just useless.
I wish I had the time to write the live preview a better way, but at that time, I was supporting Typo on my own. My current co maintainer is working on a better system with a “preview” button, much more sensible, and displaying your post with your theme’s stylesheet. Release expected very soon, maybe before Xmas.
For your textile / markdown switch issue, I understand. I’m also the retard who put that on a global way when I start an UI simplification. I will think about puting it back a more clever way (and on a per user basis).
December 6, 2008 @ 4:40 pm
Hey Frédéric!
Ha ha, come on, I didn’t call _anyone_ a retard…. and it was a rant after all ;-) Please don’t take it personally, I was never my intention.
I understand the reasons to drop the old implementation of the live preview, but it was very disappointing not having it anymore after upgrading. And I personally hate web WYSIWYG editors, so that didn’t help at all. About the themes and such, well, the only reason why I’d ever use a preview is to check the syntax: sometimes I’m not sure about the syntax of some less used options (like link aliases), or maybe I’m not sure about how some strange combinations will render (links containing commas, a trailing comma after a link, a sentence in bold with an asterisk in the middle of it…).
I also wonder why the preview was completely dropped. I understand that the implementation for the live one sucked, but why not have a non-live one, to check before publishing the post? I love the preview feature for the comments, for example, and I find it awkward that for posts I have to send them live, then check if I wrote everything correctly, then edit afterwards blindly to try to fix things, all while people might be getting wrong versions in their RSS readers or browsers.
In any case, thanks a lot for stopping by and taking the time to reply and explain!
December 6, 2008 @ 10:49 pm
“then edit afterwards blindly to try to fix things, all while people might be getting wrong versions in their RSS readers or browsers.”
Yup, to avoid that and to have a preview I publish first my posts in my Rails development environment of Typo. Not very practical.
December 7, 2008 @ 1:20 pm