Editor Discussion

[kawaii]

Hello MyBB Community!

It's long been established that the current MyBB editor, SCEditor, is not ideal. I think we all accept this. Part of the upcoming MyBB 1.9 release will hopefully alleviate your concerns and bring with it a whole new editor! We'd like to gather some community feedback and present to you a list of options (in the poll attached to this thread). The choices range from sticking with SCEditor, to developing a homebrew solution, to numerous open source alternatives and even the same premium editor used by Xenforo (though that may require community fundraising for an OEM licence).

Please see the list below, I've linked to demos where possible.

• SCEditor (current editor, open source)
  
• TinyMCE (open source)
  
• Redactor (premium, requires $1,300 OEM licence)
  
• QuillJS (open source)
  
• WysiBB (open source)
  
• DVZ MinimalEditor (open source, developed by Devilshakerz)
  
• Homebrew Editor (open source, work in progress, demo by Euan)
  
• Summernote (open source)
  
• Froala (premium, requires $1,999 Enterprise licence)
  

[Euan T]

Note that DVZ's MinimalEditor is a very similar approach/idea to the home-brew editor. The inspiration comes from GitHub's editor (and to some extent Discourse's) - a simple code based text editor with buttons to insert markup code and with a live preview of the generated formatting. This gives the best of both worlds (WYSIWYG and source mode) IMO.

[xBytez]

I chose for Redactor for the following reasons:

• The company Imperavi has been around for 10 years.
  
• They actively update Redactor. 3.x has been out for a year now and they updated last in April.
  
• I like the keyboard shortcuts, API availability and documentation they have available.
  
• Modular, 20+ example plugins available.
  
• OEM license is not insanely priced and NOT subscription based apart from support.
  

It has a simple default look, it takes weight off of MyBB's shoulders.

I do however think it does not suit the FOSS mindset, that's unfortunate.

[Euan T]

Note that buying a Redactor license only applies to the current version (v3). When a new version is released, you must buy a new license to use it (another $1300). More info is available here: https://imperavi.com/redactor/license/

[User 2877]

Note that buying a Redactor license only applies to the current version (v3). When a new version is released, you must buy a new license to use it (another $1300). More info is available here: https://imperavi.com/redactor/license/

That's not going to work for the community then.


My first instinct is WysiBB because it works with jQuery so maybe we will have less js loaded. It looks like it would be easy to implement.

[Whiteneo]

I've to say that always is 1000% better to use own projects to keep it up to date, fix bugs and issues and more, if you use an external or 3rd party editor will always expect many problems to pull requests or addittions it is sometimes unusefull due all the non usable code in the source.

And many other facts that are imposible to cover.

I always prefer own project from Euan or DVZ due it will only add the necessary facts that we use, clean code and easy to add new code buttons and more for developers and users.

[andrewjs18]

while redactor is a nice looking editor, I'd tend to agree with Euan & Labrocca that it's not really sustainable for mybb as a project if you need to keep buying a new license when a major version is released.

[s3_gunzel]

I don't see the point in changing it to anything we aren't building ourselves.

That said, I'm not convinced developing one ourselves for 1.9 is a smart move either. 1.10 maybe.

[Serpius]

I'd say go with a "homebrew" editor version.

Maybe call it... 'EditBB' - Easy to remember.

Since it will be open source, other forum software can use it and inside the open source documentation, it will be mentioned that 'EditBB' was developed by the MyBB team and that gives MyBB forum software more exposure to potential admins.

P.S. Forget the 'Redactor v.3'. 
Sure it's a nice editor, but when was the last time that MyBB was able to raise $1,300? What if version 4 came out 6 months later? 
We will need to raise another $1,300. Fat chance of that happening.

[StefanT]

I'd chose TinyMCE. It's well known, extensible and receives updates regularly.

WysiBB is dead (last update 5 years ago).

Redactor is too expensive.

I'd strongly suggest not developing your own editor. Development is already slow and writing and maintaining an editor takes countless hours. There is probably a reason XenForo and Woltlab both use Redactor and not a custom solution.