Pre-install SmartEditAddOn

The SmartEditAddOn is a JavaScript editor "à la Wikipedia" for TWiki. It makes editing and learning TML easier.

It makes sense to ship the SmartEditAddOn with the standard TWiki distribution:

• The toolbar acts as a tutorial/assistant to learn the TML
• People are familiar with edit toolbars due to popularity of Wikipedia
• MediaWiki, DokuWiki and some other wikis ship with a toolbar; from a competition point of view we should do what is considered "standard"

-- Contributors: PeterThoeny - 11 Aug 2006

Discussion

Should this be incorporated into the PatternSkin, or pre-installed in the form of an add-on?

-- PeterThoeny - 11 Aug 2006

We have seen these kinds of features in different plugins. But I always felt thay lacked stability and proper function.

This time I like what I see and I think it will be a very good idea to integrate this into the PatternSkin.

I still need to test this with a client running remote to my ADSL line. Things on a 100 MBit network goes so much faster than over an 512 kbit ADSL. Another and more severe issue is when the skin starts consisting of too many individual files. It then takes forever to load all the little icons. There is nothing worse than waiting 30 seconds for a lot of little icons to load.

I need to see how this plugin performs before I would say - go ahead.

-- KennethLavrsen - 11 Aug 2006

Good point on performance. One thing to consider: Topic list for large webs. For large webs (10K topics) it would be too slow to load all topic names at edit time; delayed loading when needed with AJAX is probably better.

-- PeterThoeny - 11 Aug 2006

The performance of SmartEditAddOn on larger topics is unacceptable. This was a great disappointment to me, as I initially was very excited about this addon, and wrote SmartEditPlugin to load it and also a skin, for those who prefer a skin-based loading of the plugin. However, I took it off our installation, as it was unbearable for anything larger than, say, 100 lines...

-- ThomasWeigert - 14 Sep 2006

On SmartEditAddOn

• gael was in vacation and preparing his final exam (was today)
• he was an intern, but is now hired to work on some other things, but has 15 days explicitely budgeted to finish a production version of smartedit starting in October
• He has access to a Mac with Safari. However ILOG will not devote any ressources to make it run on a mac (just be sure that it disabels itself on safari)
• Performance issues will have to be fixed. Alas, I am afraid that the problem is with IE and the tricks done to compensate the API lacks on it (no way to get text cursor position for instance, so he inserts markers and then search back for them). If we cannot fix it we will disable functionalities in IE to get back performance.

The performance may be optimised also by using more regexpes, which are quite underused now.

PS: another solution could be to pair smartedit with a sectional edit system.

-- ColasNahaboo - 15 Sep 2006

I am retracting this suggestion in favor of PreInstallNatEditContrib.

-- PeterThoeny - 08 Apr 2007