On 8/12/06, Dave Ross <dave.ross@gmail.com> wrote:


We are starting to get into heavier use of sam these days - and are
running into trouble with the authoring UI and wsiwyg editors. A
typical question in one of our assessments has five possible answers
with feedback on each. That leaves us with 13 instances of FCKEditor
on the edit/new question page, which has been crashing browsers and
frustrating users left & right. I've experienced crashes in both
Firefox and IE, and I'm sure it's a lot worse on older hardware.


At first I tried limiting the toolbarset in FCK, which helped
considerably but didn't truly fix the problem. I kept saying to myself
"99 times out of 100 they don't NEED all those rich text editors -
usually the rich text/images/attachments are in the question's text
and nothing else".


So I decided to hack around today and see if I could make the rich
text editors "toggle-able" ala the gmail UI I'm using right now. I
didn't take it as far as being able to go back to "plaintext" mode
after the rich text editor loads, but I did add a simple regex so that
if any html was detected in an existing value, the rich text editor
would load with the page as normal.


Just in playing around, this is a vast improvement - I've scaled 13
FckEditors on the page down to 1 (I left the Question Text as always
rich content), and I would say that it results in a much smoother
authoring experience. The user is still able to add rich text to any
element that they used to be able to - they just have to "turn it on"
with a simple click beforehand.


So obviously this is just a proof-of-concept - I have non-localized
strings in the renderer and I can't figure out how to call the
setFrameHeight(...) javascript from within the renderer (in order to
make sakai re-measure the samigo frame when a user "turns on" rich
text editing for any textbox).


I've attached the patch - it's a change to the RichTextEditor jsf
renderer, tag definition + library, and the multipleChoice.jsp page.
I'd really appreciate some samigo-developer comments on this and would
love to assist in making sam authoring more user-friendly.


thanks,


Dave Ross