- Ideas for phpBB 3.2 -

[DavidIQ]

Allow HTML in posts for admins, both when writing and editing.

As admin I can change the phpBB files on my server, but I can't insert a div, add a class to an image or style my posts to make them look prettier. I would like to add classes to images, for instance, so that small images can be floated left or right with the text flowing nicely on their side, while I want large images to be centered. And so on and so forth. A little html can do a lot to prettify.

Not to be able to use it is frustrating. Many posts could look much, much better - and looks matter.

Not very satisfying. It's actually a bit 1990-ish.

Not happening. This opens up the door to security issues and is why it's not in phpBB 3 and why we don't condone the disabling of this limitation. Also even if you were to limit this to just admins or a particular group of users what do you do when someone quotes said post? Show the text without the formatting? That would look rather silly.

All of the HTML replacements should be handled via BBCodes which is very NOT 1990-ish.

[nekkidblogger]

Not being able to make posts look tidy and neat is pretty old-fashioned.

DavidIQ writes:

Also even if you were to limit this to just admins or a particular group of users what do you do when someone quotes said post? Show the text without the formatting? That would look rather silly.

Even if if wouldn't look as good as the original, it is worse to have the both the original AND quote look bad

I see the security issues. However, other php-based software like WordPress can handle it, so I am sure it can be handled here as well. It is actually pretty hard to do code-injection in a WordPress-blog these days.

DavidIQ:

All of the HTML replacements should be handled via BBCodes which is very NOT 1990-ish.

An alternative would, I agree, be to use the BBCodes. However, as they stand, they are too limited in scope. So one would have, in that case, to expand the BB-code system - for instance with left, right and centered images, where left and right means text floats nicely on their sides as when images are floated. As it is, there is only one "class" for images in posts. I have spent a lot of time trying to bend the BBCodes to allow for at least three different CSS classes to allow predefined formatting to be applied (padding, placement, float or not), and not been able to achieve much.

So I strongly feel that either HTML in posts or an expanded BB-code system is needed. For sites like this one - more or less pure text - all is quite well. For sites that are more "multimedia" - lots of images etc., all is not very well. That is, if you, as me, think that looks matter.

Best,
Peter

[callumacrae]

WYSIWYG?

[DavidIQ]

As callum said you're probably referring to a WYSIWYG editor which has been considered (CKEditor) though no formal decision has been made on that. That would really be the way to go as most users would not be able to benefit from being able to use HTML tags anyways.

[nekkidblogger]

I don't know that editor (but will have a look at it), but that sounds like a possible solution to me.

Best,
Peter

PS: Looked good to me.

[AmigoJack]

As for the lists there is an value for what type you can do

for number or
for lowercase alpha etc...

I wasn't talking about the existing (first) parameter of the list=-code - re-read my numbers IV, V and VII:

• Make the list item ([ * ]) have an optional parameter, like [*={NUMBER}] which would render to <li value="{NUMBER}"> and so give the possibility to force a new iteration value instead of the one counted automatically.
  
  
  
• Same goes for ([list=]) itself: let it have an optional second parameter, like [list={IDENTIFIER},{NUMBER}] which would render to <ol type="{IDENTIFIER}" start="{NUMBER}"> and so give the possibility to defining a starting value.
  
  
  
• [list=] should also allow the type none and all CSS2 types: lower-greek, hebrew, decimal-leading-zero, cjk-ideographic, hiragana, katakana, hiragana-iroha and katakana-iroha. (Improvement ticket)

With implementing the first two of these three points I could have easily fully quoted my text along with the historic list numbers (IV, V and VII instead of bullets or just an iteration starting from new, like I, II, III).