Update on some new site features coming in the near future (Channel 9)

Hey folks, Duncan from the dev team here. Just wanted to give you a heads up that we'll be rolling out some new features along with a list of bug fixes in the next few days.

The main new feature is a completely new editor. We've moved to TinyMCE for the commenting and creating new threads, and along with that move we've fixed a few of the issues that have been brought up around the editing experience. For one, we'll have a emoticon drop down finally Smiley

and the insert image and insert URL dialogs should be much faster and simpler to use.

At the same time as this update, we'll be rolling out fixes to some bugs that you've reported, including seeing the 'subject' field in some cases when commenting on videos, the fact that the 'all forums' feed is not updating and others.

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Zeus Why is the caption missing??

May 08, 2009 at 12:21 PM

Why the move from Telerik, a Microsoft owned company ... ?
Bas It finds lightbulbs.

May 08, 2009 at 2:17 PM

Because the current editor is a disaster?

Looks good. Yay emoticon dropdown!
Duncanma "yeah that's awful close, but that's not why I'm so hard done by"

May 08, 2009 at 4:49 PM

Telerik is owned by Microsoft? I had no idea (and, not to be rude, but I still don't... do you have a reference for that?).

As to why, the TinyMCE editor is easier for us to customize and is lighter weight on the page. Telerik makes good stuff and we are still using their editor in our admin pages, and their script combining/compression on all of our pages, but we think the TinyMCE editor will provide a better experience for the users.
joechung

May 08, 2009 at 5:02 PM

Microsoft doesn't own Telerik.
vesuvius Count Orlock

May 09, 2009 at 9:45 AM

It's always a toss up between freetextbox and tinymce. I have used it in Umbraco and it is lovely little editor. I would also recomend these icons for the editor as they are simply gorgeous.

Please don't leave us using Office 2003 icons for the next however many years.
TommyCarlier Widen your gaze

May 10, 2009 at 2:10 AM

The problem with the “WYSIWYG Sapphire” icons is that they look pretty good at large sizes, but at 16x16 they look kind of blurry. I don't mind the Office 2003 icons; they are very functional and not ugly at all. There are more modern icon sets available that do look good at 16x16, but I don't think Sapphire is one of those.

At work, we use a combination of FamFamFam Silk Icons, PI Diagona Pack and Tango Desktop Project.

P.S.: now that I look at the “PI Diagona Pack”-page, I see they have a new icon set called “Fugue Icons”, which also looks pretty good (and has a lot of different icons; all kinds of arrows, a lot of variation, …)
Bas It finds lightbulbs.

May 10, 2009 at 5:44 AM

I found Tiny's plugin model a terrible pain to work with, though. Especially when the only documentation you have is their unhelpful wiki, which basically has "look at the sample plugin" as an explanation. Buy some plugins from them, like the file and image browser, and you're off even worse. Their support to my question regarding IIS aliases and file paths was "use firebug to debug it!"
Duncanma "yeah that's awful close, but that's not why I'm so hard done by"

May 11, 2009 at 2:45 AM

I'll pass the icon feedback along, I'm pretty sure we are just using the defaults right now but we can certainly look at changing to one of those options.
TheWerewolf

May 11, 2009 at 9:56 AM

Why not use Silverlight/ASP.Net for this?
Duncanma "yeah that's awful close, but that's not why I'm so hard done by"

May 11, 2009 at 10:26 AM

I'm not sure what you mean? We definitely are using ASP.NET as our page engine, and we are using Silverlight for our video players... but for an editor I don't believe it would add much value. Forcing people to install a client side component so they can comment in our forums or on a video is not a great experience either, and we'd still need to support a fallback scenario for non-Silverlight-capable clients.

My apologies if I'm not understanding you correctly...
Charles Welcome Change

May 11, 2009 at 10:28 AM

I don't think we'd want to force the installation of Silverlight so that users can create or reply to posts....
C
spiderLab

May 11, 2009 at 11:09 AM

We have been using TinyMCE since the 3.0 version and has been very happy with it.
The flexibility is superb, but most important the latest releases is very stable regarding to document editing.

But I see Channel 9 is using line breaks when pressing the enter key (force_linebreaks option in TinyMCE).
Regarding the TinyMCE team it is very experimental, and in my experience not stable when editing complex documents. I recomend that you test this option out before releasing. I left it a long time ago.
spiderLab

May 11, 2009 at 11:10 AM

Why does clicking on my avatar/picture take me to another user?
Duncanma "yeah that's awful close, but that's not why I'm so hard done by"

May 12, 2009 at 2:54 AM

Annoying bug there, but it has been fixed now, thanks for pointing it out!