What is this editor?

What is this editor?

by joseph zabrosky -
Number of replies: 6

Hi,

Spent two weeks solid setting everything up adding 34 sections of content, 287 footnotes that are links, 30 videos to find out the text editor doesn't work. what a joke. I've worked in wordpress enough to know no text editor is this hard to work with.

Tiny MCE Html editor - when i put a space between paragraph and then save it the space is not there. doesn't matter if it's 1, 5 or 10 spaces they don't show up after saving. Or if you change the font of a section the entire format of that section that had spaces between paragraphs no longer has spaces - it's one big block of text. It seems there's nothing you can do except call a vendor and pay for their instruction. I say this because i was told there's some 30 paid techs who work on developing moodle for years yet with all of those paid employees they can't create a solid, user friendly text editor. Yeah, right. I don't believe it. joe


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In reply to joseph zabrosky

Re: What is this editor?

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

Hello Joseph.If you want the TinyMCE editor then you can either go to your profile -look at the administration block and expand My profile settings and go to Edit profile and then expand Preferences>Text editor to "Tiny MCE editor" just for you - OR - you can go to Site administration>Plugins>Text editors>Manage text editors, move TinyMCE up to the top and hide Atto (the default editor) so everyone will use TinyMCE.

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In reply to joseph zabrosky

Re: What is this editor?

by Richard Oelmann -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Are you using Atto or TinyMCE?

Atto is developed in-house by Moodle HQ, but the TinyMCE editor you seem to be complaining about is not and never has been. It is a 3rd party editor, widely used on many sites around the web which the HQ developer team have previously integrated into moodle. They have not been responsible for its development.

The version shipped with moodle is a legacy TinyMCE3 as it was decided to move to Atto a few versions ago and not to spend HQ time on integrating TinyMCE4. Therefore, if you have issues with Atto - that's something for the Moodle HQ development team to sort out and should be posted as a tracker issue - either bug or improvement as appropriate. But if your issue is with TinyMCE, the issue itself should be posted with them not with Moodle, except where it relates directly to how the editor is integrated into Moodle itself - but is unlikely to get any work done on it as the move is towards Atto as the core editor anyway.


http://www.tinymce.com/

Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to joseph zabrosky

Re: What is this editor?

by Just H -



Nice rant but if you are actually after a resolution to your issues how about stating what you actually did e.g. where you adding code or just text and adding links etc. via the buttons?

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In reply to Just H

Re: What is this editor?

by joseph zabrosky -

I don't claim to be perfect and I certainly don't claim to be an expert moodler, nor do i care to be as i don't have time to be an expert at everything. I don't feel bad for expressing frustration relative to what i shared. It's a normal response. I know that cause in the little time I've been moodling I've seen others express similar views in forums.

I just want to get my job done. In light of moodle who appears to seek suggestions, I figured out the problem, but that's what I'm saying - the lack of options with the default editor and lack of user friendliness of the other option in the Tiny MCE HTML editor on such a broad and detailed platform as moodle. I have a lot of experience in text editors on different platforms. The editor being a cornerstone in any platform. Sorry if i wasn't constructive enough.

I do thank you as you've been a reliable source of help. 

For the sake of others, the solution to the problem was having to click on the 'clean up messy code' icon and then 'remove formatting' icon to first clean everything up and then put in new formatting. 

I worked all night on it and while i knew from past experience that 'wingdings' font family choice does not give you usable text, but for some reason last night when I clicked on it it gave me the text i sought while in edit mode for 34 sections of my program. And while checking the results outside the editor it gave me the font i desired section after section. So, i used it for the whole course and it looked fine in the editor and outside the editor, which I thought maybe moodle does things differently. I woke up today to find a wingdings text throughout my course looking how a wingdings text is suppose to look - chaotic nonsense. The point is that it looked fine in the editor and outside the editor in real time, but the next morning looked completely different. Now that's a valid claim. So i have more work to do.

Peace... 

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In reply to joseph zabrosky

Re: What is this editor?

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
Hi Joseph

IMHO this is a fundamental problem in "visual" editing. The immediate visual availability tempts you to "play" with visual effects, like the font, and to forget the content, those 34 sections. If you need a different font or any other course-wide visual effects, you should customize the theme. Read about the basic idea behind CSS.

Another problem, for me at least, is that Moodle itself is not a good authoring tool. For me:
a) My favorite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_editor - not the Moodle's false https://docs.moodle.org/en/Text_editor - is the best tool
b) I don't want to make my teaching material Moodle-specific, need to have PDF, HTML and sometimes even e-book. Well, the major part of it, I know that an Assignment in Moodle can not be PDF!

Here is my work flow in more detail: "PDF and HTML from the same LaTeX source, a minimal example" https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=276119.
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In reply to joseph zabrosky

Re: What is this editor?

by Phuong Hoang -

I agree with you, Joseph! "I figured out the problem, but that's what I'm saying - the lack of options with the default editor and lack of user friendliness of the other option in the Tiny MCE HTML editor on such a broad and detailed platform as moodle".

+ For example: In discussion forums, I'd like to demonstrate google docs, slideshare, flash etc. Not a link or attachment! I want my students to have a look at my documents before they decide to download them. How can I embed these files - (google docs, slideshare, flash etc)? Install plugins (Poodll anywhere/ Generico...)? That's a struggle! In Vbullentin, zetaboards, nukeviet, wordpress and so on, this work's very simple. I strongly believe that experts can make moodle better. But Why not?

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