Moodle in English: No text editor body

If I try to add a new event, the page loads with only the top menu of the text editor, but there is no body to type text into for the description . (see attached image) If I toggle to html source, a teeny tiny body appears with a scrollbar.

Any idea why this might be.

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Re: No text editor body

by Andrea Bicciolo - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 2:15 AM

Hi Chardelle, I experienced the same problem with IE6 under WinXP just before the 1.3 Release. It has been fixed now. What Moodle version are you running?

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Re: No text editor body

by Chardelle Busch - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 2:50 AM

Hi Andrea,

Martin just upgraded my site to 1.3 and I this is my first time to try the calendar. I am also using IE6 under WinXP. The weird thing is that I tried adding events several times for each type of event and every now and then the body section does show up, but there is no reason to it, it seems to be a random occurrence. I might have to wait and have Martin check into it.

Thanks for the reply

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Re: No text editor body

by Jean-Pierre Pawlak - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 3:05 AM

Same problem over here (IE6/XP). Reloading the page seems to solve the problem.

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Re: No text editor body

by Chardelle Busch - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 5:07 AM

Yes, if you refresh the page it does bring up the text editor body, although this does not solve the problem. As far as I am concerned, the calendar is not usable at this point. I don't want to have to tell users that if they are working under IE6/XP they have to click on new event, then hit refresh, then retry, then they can add the event. Not user-friendly. sad

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Re: No text editor body

by Martin Dougiamas - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 12:47 PM

No matter how much I try this with IE/XP I can not duplicate this bug in the HTML editor, which has been getting occasional reoprts in different contexts for the past couple of months.

It only happens on IE, and it only happens sometimes, it seems. I can't see anything strange in your site logs, Chardelle - I'm at a bit of a loss.

Is the HTML editor working fine on all other pages? (note that the editor is enabled in exactly the same way throughout Moodle)

What about if you try to add a user event in the calendar on this site? Is the editor OK?

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Re: No text editor body

by Chardelle Busch - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 1:19 PM

Yes, I get the same thing here (see attached). I was just looking at the source code of the add event page and comparing it to the source code for adding a post and I did find this difference (now don't laugh if this is silly cause you know I know nothing about coding)

From the add event to calendar page with text editor:

And from an add post page:

Could it be that there just aren't enough rows for the text area to show up?

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Re: No text editor body

by Martin Dougiamas - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 1:46 PM

I doubt this is the reason, but one never knows with flaky IE, so I've increased the number of lines just on moodle.org ... can you try it again?

Also, can you turn all on Javascript error reports in IE ... maybe you'll see something.

Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> "Display a notification about every script error"

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Re: No text editor body

by Chardelle Busch - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 2:12 PM

Yes, now the text editor comes up just fine! (Wouldn't it be nice if IE just went away) I hope this fixes the problem cause I'm going to bed now.

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Re: No text editor body

by koen roggemans - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 3:47 PM

Verry strange. How is it possible that there aren't enough rows when the script is accessed the first time and then works fine after a refresh ? triest

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Re: No text editor body

by Martin Dougiamas - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 4:28 PM

Can anyone else who was having the problem please try it too? (just make yourself an event on moodle.org) If this is the solution I'll be very surprised! Note my IE was always working so it must be a client setting somewhere.

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Re: No text editor body

by Jean-Pierre Pawlak - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 6:57 PM

Just tried it in the Dutch forum. No text editor body...

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Re: No text editor body

by Richard Williamson - Tuesday, 1 June 2004, 5:50 PM

I had this problem, but Moodle.org now works for me. I don't think anyone has mentioned this, but my cure was to enlarge the editor to full screen - it worked fine then.

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Re: No text editor body

by Michael Penney - Monday, 7 June 2004, 6:18 AM

Hi Martin, what file do you increase the lines in?

Thanks!

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Hi Martin, since this problem with html editor and IE was apparenty NOT fixed in 1.3.1

by Michael Penney - Friday, 11 June 2004, 2:33 AM

at least not for everyone, (see http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=8754&parent=42212)and some of us can't ugrade right now anyway for other reasons.

Can you please tell me where to increase the number of lines?

Thanks!

Michael

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Re: Hi Martin, since this problem with html editor and IE was apparenty NOT fixed in 1.3.1

by Martin Dougiamas - Friday, 11 June 2004, 10:23 AM

Michael,

Unfortunately, it's not a simple change ... the HTML had to be moved around to workaround some very quirky IE behaviour.

Everyone who tested the fixes for me said it worked ... on which pages is it not working for you?

If you can't upgrade the server I recommend getting Firefox which never had this problem.

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Re: No text editor body

by Peter Sereinigg - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 1:30 PM

Hi Martin, we have the same problem with users in the german forum,
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=8309,
Sometimes it happens at my pc (BUT not before final 1.3)

Workarround, reload the page ...

Peter

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Re: No text editor body

by koen roggemans - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 1:51 PM

I get it also every now and then. Another workaround is to hit the full screen button of the editor.

Martin, have you tried to restore the lessen in the backup I posted in bug 1327 ? When I try to edit the first page, it's so bad that I never get an editorbody. (multiple editors on one page) (on IE / win2k desktop)?

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Re: No text editor body

by Janne Mikkonen - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 2:27 PM

See bug 1070

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Refresh/shift-refres h toggles editor body on/off

by Fernando Oliveira - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 9:40 PM

Just tried adding a new event within the Moodle site (Moodle Demo Features course) and this is what I experienced:

When I add a new event, the text editor body is NOT present but...

When I do a regular refresh (no shift), the editor body is expanded.

When I do a forced refresh (shift + refresh) the editor body disappears.

In effect, I can toggle the editor body on or off by alternating between a forced refresh and regular refresh. Can anyone else duplicate this error?

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No text editor body

by Chardelle Busch - Thursday, 27 May 2004, 10:52 PM

Yes, I did duplicate this bizarre refreshing toggle effect. Does anybody know IE well enough to figure this out?

Also, could everybody post here what versions of things they are using. Maybe it is a combination of things. I am using IE 6 and XP.

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Re: No text editor body

by Chardelle Busch - Friday, 28 May 2004, 12:04 AM

Update: I have had some users test this and so far nobody has had a problem with the text editor, even under IE6/Win XP, so the mystery remains. I do know that since Martin changed the rows setup on Moodle, I have not had a problem--the text editor body always shows up, but on my site, where I haven't changed the row setup yet, I still have the problem (but it does seem to come and go). I am going to wait awhile to change this on my site to see if anybody else reports having the problem.

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Re: No text editor body

by Jeff Wood - Saturday, 29 May 2004, 8:22 AM

I have the problem, intermittently, on my site too when adding events to the calendar.

Seems most prevalent when editing an existing event. A refresh seems to clear things up.

Go to link below for a video clip maybe it will help?!

http://www.mjwoodresources.ca/test/htmleditorproblem.swf

Jeff

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Re: No text editor body

by Paul Nijbakker - Thursday, 3 June 2004, 2:23 PM

IE 6 with Win XP has been causing trouble for us in combination with another VLE, WebCT! I work with IE6 under Win 2000 and have no such problems, either with WebCT or Moodle. My only complaint is that sometimes the editor toolbar does not load entirely, which may freeze the browser, but that is not Moodle's problem.

In our experience with IE6 under Win XP there is something in the JAVA settings that causes problems, at least with WebCT. I cannot duplicate your problem, so I am not sure that could possibly have any effect on Moodle (which as far as I understand has no JAVA included).

Rgrds, Paul.

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Re: No text editor body

by Shirin Shirvani - Wednesday, 2 June 2004, 7:24 PM

For running HTML Editor , these fuctions must be called ::

print_textarea(1,8, 50, "", "", "intro", "", $courseid=0);
use_html_editor("intro");

into= the name of field;

If you want to call these fuction use_html_editor("intro"); in the *.php file ,you must call without any prarameter. like this : use_html_editor();
because when *.php file wants to render HTML page the editor had problem and can not show its body.

Pay attention that you can have as many as HTML Editors you want to have and in this file (*.php), and the number of print_textarea(1,8, 50, "", "", "intro", "", $courseid=0); fuction explan the number of your HTML Editor in your page, but just for one time in the end of that section you must call this fuction (use_html_editor()); .

And if you want to call it in *.html, you must call it with parameter. like: use_html_editor("intro");

I solved my problem from this way. And I hope for you................

Shirin Shirvani

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Re: No text editor body

by Martin Dougiamas - Thursday, 3 June 2004, 9:31 PM

OK, I've found and fixed these problems in the Moodle 1.3 branch, and will soon release a Moodle 1.3.1 for you all.

The problems were actually different in various places ... I still don't know why sometimes it worked in some IE installations and sometimes not in others with exactly the same specs, but it might have been timing-related.

On the calendar page there seems to have been a timing conflict with another Javascript, and on many of the module-creation pages the problem seems to be with a Javascript that was embedded inside a table.

It's all very strange, but I feel pretty confident it's all fixed now.

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Re: No text editor body

by Shannon Morgan - Wednesday, 15 September 2004, 9:19 PM

So...if we are running 1.3.4 should we be experiencing this problem? We recently upgraded and now all of the sudden students are having problems.

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Re: No text editor body

by Martin Dougiamas - Wednesday, 15 September 2004, 9:26 PM

Absolutely no idea what would be going on there, sorry. I thought it was all fixed ...

Make sure you don't have blank lines in your config.php

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Re: No text editor body

by Mike Thompson - Tuesday, 8 February 2005, 1:05 AM

The problem of no body in the htmlarea of the html editor seems to have appeared out of the blue. It occurs on all our courses but predominately only when we create a new Forum Thread or a New Forum (it does not appear to happen when we reply to thread nor when the editor is called by other functions such as "add a web link" or "add a label"). The attached screen shot shows what we get - including the rather strange path.

We are using Moodle1.4.3+ with XP and IE6, both with SP2.

The problem appears to have emerged in the last week or so and no changes have been made to our set up in that time frame.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Mike Thompson

Truro College

Cornwall

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Re: No text editor body

by Laurie Savage - Tuesday, 8 February 2005, 7:45 AM

It's bizarre. The same thing has happened on our system today. Same set up and quite out of the blue. Mozilla came to the rescue. We have it installed on all our XP machines.

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Re: No text editor body

by Mike Thompson - Tuesday, 8 February 2005, 7:00 PM

We seem to have solved this mystery - having said that we made no changes, we realised that we had changed our Moodle theme to Cornflower. When we changed back to any of the standard themes the HTML area problem goes away - both the Cornflower and the Poweraid themes seem to have the problem.

Anyone got any thoughts about what might be bdifferent in the way these themes get rendered which could affect the HTML editor?

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Re: No text editor body

by Ray Jr - Wednesday, 9 February 2005, 1:35 AM

Hello Mike,

I'm using Cornflower theme (Moodle 1.4.3+, IE6, XPS2) and I'm not experiencing any problems with html editor.

Can you repeat this problem by going back to Cornflower? I would like to know if this is an intermittent or constant problem. In other words, does the problem always occur when you switch to Cornflower?

Regards,

Ray

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Re: No text editor body

by Bill Burgos - Wednesday, 9 February 2005, 9:03 AM

Hi Mike,

I'll take a stab at it. May or may not help....

Have you made any changes to the themes you are using? Customizing? colors? logos? etc.?

Strange things could happen if you leave blank lines at the end of the config.php files in the theme directory. Blank lines are automatically put into the file when you are editing in CPanel and some of the Microsoft word processors. Checking the cornflower theme config.php for this might also be a start.

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Re: No text editor body

by Mike Thompson - Wednesday, 9 February 2005, 9:35 PM

Hi guys

We are using the standard Moodle Themes without any changes at all. We have tried swapping back to Cornflower and the problem comes back without exception.

We will take a look at the config file to see if there are any blank lines.

We will experiment with a customised theme to see if we can re-create the problem.

Cheers

Mike

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Re: No text editor body

by John Hobson - Saturday, 12 February 2005, 12:33 AM

I have been having this probalem for the last six months. Refreshing generally does the job so I can live with it. Win XP Sp2, IE6 and customised Poweraid. Sounds like I am asking for it!

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Re: No text editor body

by Mike Thompson - Saturday, 12 February 2005, 3:33 AM

Hi John

Just as an experiment try changing to a standard Moodle theme (not Cornflower) - I bet the problem goes away.

We cannot find any logical reson for this behaviour except that it is only there when we use IE6 - Firefox is fine - but as an Institution we are bound to IE6 -Boo Hoo!!

Mike

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Re: No text editor body

by Cypercat Saint - Wednesday, 16 February 2005, 6:56 AM

I am having the same problem with the same theme. Will work with firefox but not IE6.

If you come up with a solution let me know...I like this theme

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Re: No text editor body

by Monika Sawicka - Thursday, 13 July 2006, 5:23 AM

Hi everyone,

that post is for everyone who tried everything but the body of the HTML editor don't show up anyway.

In my case my IE browsers didn't accept height = "auto" specified in HTMLArea.Config = function () in htmlarea.php (line 107). So instead of "auto" for height and width I put numbers. Now my html editor always has the same size, but at least shows up every time.

---------------------------------------

before: (line: 107-117)

HTMLArea.Config = function () {
this.version = "3.0";

this.width = "auto";
this.height = "auto";

// enable creation of a status bar?
this.statusBar = true;

// maximum size of the undo queue
this.undoSteps = 20;

.....

after

HTMLArea.Config = function () {
this.version = "3.0";

this.width = 620;
this.height = 250;

// enable creation of a status bar?
this.statusBar = true;

// maximum size of the undo queue
this.undoSteps = 20;

Best regards

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Re: No text editor body

by Daniel Mikšík - Saturday, 5 March 2005, 1:18 AM

I was able to reproduce the "no editor window" problem in calendar both at my site, and here at moodle.org (in the Playground course - see attached file).

As one of my colleagues pointed out that she has been running into trouble only when trying to add a calendar event for several times consecutively, I changed the IE setting for Temporary Internet Files to Check for newer versions of stored pages: Every visit to the page. And the problem disappeared.

Could I ask some of those having the same problem to confirm or contradict my finding? Thank you.

Attachment calendar_no_editor_window.png

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Re: No text editor body

by James Robertson - Thursday, 23 June 2005, 6:03 AM

Hi Daniel,

Thanks, that fixed it for me. I am running 1.5 (22 Jun CVS) on WinXP and Win32, IE6, theme is 1.5 Moodle Standard with 2 minor alterations. I had not seen any problem until I edited a calendar event just after saving it. Apparently this problem can still bite (it bit me), so I am surprised to see no other responses to your post.

I am also surprised that stored page version would have this effect, since the editor didn't reappear even when I used the pop-up large editor and then closed it, or went to another page and then came back.

Jim Robertson.

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Re: No text editor body

by Stephen Reiach - Friday, 11 November 2005, 4:36 AM

I know this is an older post but im a new user trying to solve this problem.

I tried the 'Every visit' change however it still has the same problem. Especially when trying to make a new question for quizes. The refresh page never works.

Using the 'Enlarged editor' does work though.

Moodle 1.5 on Windows XP IE 6.

Has anything worked for anyone else?

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Re: No text editor body

by Mike Churchward - Tuesday, 22 March 2005, 11:35 PM

This problem has just crept back into my site... Its occuring in a custom display I have created, and I have gone through it thoroughly for HTML errors (there are none). No scripting errors come up either, and it only happens on IE.

One thing I have noticed is that if I clear the cache, it always works the first time. Thereafter, the problem comes back. Don't know why caching should cause a problem.

Does it matter where the htmleditor script appears in the file?

UPDATE:
I moved the 'use_html_editor' script around so that its one of the last things on the page and outside of all the tables. This seems to make it work consistently on IE. No idea why positioning should matter.

mike

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Re: No text editor body

by Martin Dougiamas - Wednesday, 23 March 2005, 12:12 AM

Yes, use_html_editor definitely has to be one of the last things on the page. It's completely wierd but I came to the same conlusion. My guess is some sort of timing issue in the IE rendering ...

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Re: No text editor body

by Janne Mikkonen - Wednesday, 23 March 2005, 2:44 AM

I second that.

IE seem to "read" page from top to bottom while it's rendering it. Mozilla/Firefox seem to "read" page from bottom to top, which means that it'll wait until the whole page is loaded ( not exact science

), but I if you have two editor at one page you can test it by counting loaded frames (window.frames) and in Firefox the last editor is in frames index 0 and with IE the fist editor is in frames index 0.

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Re: No text editor body

by Dan Segarra - Wednesday, 16 November 2005, 4:26 AM

UPDATE:
I moved the 'use_html_editor' script around so that its one of the last things on the page and outside of all the tables. This seems to make it work consistently on IE. No idea why positioning should matter

How does one go about 'moving' the 'use_html_editor' script'

Moodle came with my site and I love it, but I see this as a serious problem for my members.

Thanks

Dan

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Re: No text editor body

by Wen Hao Chuang - Saturday, 15 July 2006, 5:12 AM

By the way, any recent update on this serious bug?? Is there any proposed fix that REALLY permanently fix this problem on IE?? Anyone ever test this on IE7 beta?? Thanks!

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Re: No text editor body

by Monika Sawicka - Saturday, 15 July 2006, 5:54 AM

Hi Wen,

Yes, I has tested this on IE7 and .. under English Windows it works, but for example Spanish version doesn't. Try to change the width and height in htmlarea.php (check my previous post)

Best Regards,

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Re: No text editor body

by Layla Khamis - Monday, 27 November 2006, 6:42 PM

Monika Sawicka ! thanx, the problem is solved for me for now wink

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Re: No text editor body

by Tim Grech - Tuesday, 28 November 2006, 4:26 AM

I have this problem with XP, IE6 and IE7 at worl. No problem with Firefox.

I don't have access to our Moodle site to change any files, nor could I.

I will try changing to another standard theme, although we are currently using a standard theme.

Pressing CTRL+F5 works but we have to do it every time!

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Re: No text editor body

by Tim Grech - Wednesday, 29 November 2006, 6:01 AM

Woohooo! Changinbg themes worked for me anyhow - we were using Cornflower (suggested problem on another thread).

Sorry to all for duplicating this everywhere.

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Re: No text editor body

by Wen Hao Chuang - Thursday, 8 March 2007, 9:03 AM

Just wondering if there is a bug tracker entry for this one, and if so, what is the number? Did this issue actually get fixed in Moodle 1.8? Many thanks!

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