Date Aug 12, 2006 8:12 PM EDT From Dave Ross Subject Authoring -> wsiwyg overload 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 Albany Medical College |