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RE: Alloy Editor URGENT review
Not just in the latest 7.2 version ... we need an urgent review into the UX of Alloy Editor, period. It's the worst editor I've ever used.
It depends on the usecase.
AlloyEditor works pretty nice on the new content pages, but I agree, for other places, like forum or Wiki, it doesn't work so well. That forum here is actually a good (or bad?) example.
It is also quite meh for webcontent. We have hooked it a couple of times to add functionality. It broke several times (with patches) and we had to fix our extensions again. In the last two years we mostly enforced the use of structures with text fields + templates instead.
- Many missing features (Tables and all the usual ckeditor stuff). Why can't I just enable them?
- It is hard to add features yourself since there are not enough examples and documentation. Maybe it is better now, but for us extensions broke a couple of times in the past when we installed patches.
- A standard editor (like CKEditor, TinyMCE, ...) would be more convenient since there are usually lots of plugins.
AlloyEditor works pretty nice on the new content pages, but I agree, for other places, like forum or Wiki, it doesn't work so well. That forum here is actually a good (or bad?) example.
It is also quite meh for webcontent. We have hooked it a couple of times to add functionality. It broke several times (with patches) and we had to fix our extensions again. In the last two years we mostly enforced the use of structures with text fields + templates instead.
- Many missing features (Tables and all the usual ckeditor stuff). Why can't I just enable them?
- It is hard to add features yourself since there are not enough examples and documentation. Maybe it is better now, but for us extensions broke a couple of times in the past when we installed patches.
- A standard editor (like CKEditor, TinyMCE, ...) would be more convenient since there are usually lots of plugins.
Hey Lee, we're looking into this.
While AlloyEditor has indeed issues, a lot of the frustration comes from less than ideal configurations, product decisions or ootb CKEditor issues that are all being conflated into AlloyEditor. That being said, and as Christoph brings up, a lot of it depends on the use case. Some things:
You can. It's certainly not easy. There's a nice AlloyEditor Manager plugin in the marketplace that should make this simpler although I haven't had the chance to try it out. We definitely need to do something like this. We had some early POCs but were even then too complicated to implement and didn't help much...
We offer both CKEditor and TinyMCE OOTB. You can simply enable them via properties. This has always been the case. This still puzzles me, although my instinct says that the fact that we set one editor by default and don't heavily advertise the others makes it seem like there are no valid options. I think we can do better in the future, maybe making the configuration more visual (Settings) rather than programatic (properties) and offering more clear documentation.
In summary: we're hoping to make some improvements to the whole content generation experience before our next DXP 7.3 release and continue from there.
While AlloyEditor has indeed issues, a lot of the frustration comes from less than ideal configurations, product decisions or ootb CKEditor issues that are all being conflated into AlloyEditor. That being said, and as Christoph brings up, a lot of it depends on the use case. Some things:
Many missing features (Tables and all the usual ckeditor stuff). Why can't I just enable them?
You can. It's certainly not easy. There's a nice AlloyEditor Manager plugin in the marketplace that should make this simpler although I haven't had the chance to try it out. We definitely need to do something like this. We had some early POCs but were even then too complicated to implement and didn't help much...
A standard editor (like CKEditor, TinyMCE, ...) would be more convenient since there are usually lots of plugins.
We offer both CKEditor and TinyMCE OOTB. You can simply enable them via properties. This has always been the case. This still puzzles me, although my instinct says that the fact that we set one editor by default and don't heavily advertise the others makes it seem like there are no valid options. I think we can do better in the future, maybe making the configuration more visual (Settings) rather than programatic (properties) and offering more clear documentation.
In summary: we're hoping to make some improvements to the whole content generation experience before our next DXP 7.3 release and continue from there.
Chema Balsas:
Well, that's actually what I meant. We changed the AlloyEditor behavior a couple of times, but we always ran into problems (well, we ran into problems two years ago, so today things might be different). IMHO it is simply too hard to extend the editor. Thanks for the link to the Manager, if I need to do something with the editor again, I will look into it.
You can. It's certainly not easy. There's a nice AlloyEditor Manager plugin in the marketplace that should make this simpler although I haven't had the chance to try it out. We definitely need to do something like this. We had some early POCs but were even then too complicated to implement and didn't help much...
But I think, that's only part of the problem. AlloyEditor is fine for some usecases, but e.g. here in the forum it is either a bad choice or needs customizations. e.g. I currently have no idea where quotes end and start. It simply doesn't show it in the editor view.
We offer both CKEditor and TinyMCE OOTB. You can simply enable them via properties. This has always been the case. This still puzzles me, although my instinct says that the fact that we set one editor by default and don't heavily advertise the others makes it seem like there are no valid options. I think we can do better in the future, maybe making the configuration more visual (Settings) rather than programatic (properties) and offering more clear documentation.We tried once to "fallback" to the CKEditor but ran into problems (I forgot, what happened exactly), but I got the feeling, that these editors are not properly tested since nobody uses them. I never tried to enable TinyMCE before, but after CKEditor wasn't that much of a success.
A while ago, the forum here was configured to use CKEditor since Alloy has some issues. But the behavior was even worse, so it was rolled back again.
In summary: we're hoping to make some improvements to the whole content generation experience before our next DXP 7.3 release and continue from there.
I wouldn't touch customization of Alloy Editor with a barge pole.
There has got to be a way for you guys to see what we do. Maybe the Alloy Editor team could run DXP on the Alloy Editor site and force themselves to see the issues we see? We can't create beautiful content with this editor, it won't allow us to.
Quite often too it's actually DXP getting in the way. My current issue with punctuation being removed could be anti-sammy. It's a beautiful editor but the UX has suffered. Some new users don't know they have to select some text to bring up the black bar. You sit on a screenshare trying to walk someone through how to make text bold and it's a very, very, very testing experience for me and them. You finally get an image in the right place publish the content and boom, the image is all jacked up and the padding is wrong.
It's featureless too. It barely covers basic editing and the editing it does do it fails at doing.
Users also find a way, so you took away the font size ... so what do our users do now? They make their text all one big heading level 2, because that's the only way they can increase the font size. Now I'm getting calls from my accessibility team bemoaning the product that you say creates beautiful content peacefully and gets out of the way and let's people just get on with writing. It does no such thing. It takes hours to write a blog post that looks half decent because you're fighting against developer assumptions about what you should and shouldn't be able to do with your own content.
This editor is not fit for purpose yet.
There has got to be a way for you guys to see what we do. Maybe the Alloy Editor team could run DXP on the Alloy Editor site and force themselves to see the issues we see? We can't create beautiful content with this editor, it won't allow us to.
Quite often too it's actually DXP getting in the way. My current issue with punctuation being removed could be anti-sammy. It's a beautiful editor but the UX has suffered. Some new users don't know they have to select some text to bring up the black bar. You sit on a screenshare trying to walk someone through how to make text bold and it's a very, very, very testing experience for me and them. You finally get an image in the right place publish the content and boom, the image is all jacked up and the padding is wrong.
It's featureless too. It barely covers basic editing and the editing it does do it fails at doing.
Users also find a way, so you took away the font size ... so what do our users do now? They make their text all one big heading level 2, because that's the only way they can increase the font size. Now I'm getting calls from my accessibility team bemoaning the product that you say creates beautiful content peacefully and gets out of the way and let's people just get on with writing. It does no such thing. It takes hours to write a blog post that looks half decent because you're fighting against developer assumptions about what you should and shouldn't be able to do with your own content.
This editor is not fit for purpose yet.
Here's some direct feedback on the consequences of removing features from the editor. Font size, we don't have it, people need it. The Push back has been from Alloy Editor devs that WE all in the community should finish their product. Is this really the way to treat the community? Alloy Editor's team say it is not a feature that is needed, people don't need to change font size (but that's an assumption made in isolation) , a feature that gets in the way of creating beautiful content. This is nonsense. Paragraphs of H2's is not beautiful but it's the only way users can increase the size of their font.
Color of font. This is a missing feature. We've been shouting about this for four years, when will users be listened to? I'm not going to customize the editor to put in features that should be there from the get go.
Take Basic Web Content. The only way to change the color of the font is to use Look and Feel in the web display widget. So we move to fragments and the web content widget is without look and feel? Rubbish!! We need features! Come on. I get it for blogs and message boards, even comments and content pages move us in a good direction but you've had to do that to make up for what is lacking in Alloy Editor.
It doesn't work in IE ... it just doesn't. While it was optimistic to think users would migrate to a different browser, in enterprise this hasn't happened. The worst functionality in IE is the image plugin, let alone anything nice to have like videos. Images are a nightmare in Alloy Editor.
People can't create content that is anything other than one size black text without images. This is not rich text!! Worse the editor this thing is based on provides MORE features. So what's the point of Alloy Editor?
Color of font. This is a missing feature. We've been shouting about this for four years, when will users be listened to? I'm not going to customize the editor to put in features that should be there from the get go.
Take Basic Web Content. The only way to change the color of the font is to use Look and Feel in the web display widget. So we move to fragments and the web content widget is without look and feel? Rubbish!! We need features! Come on. I get it for blogs and message boards, even comments and content pages move us in a good direction but you've had to do that to make up for what is lacking in Alloy Editor.
It doesn't work in IE ... it just doesn't. While it was optimistic to think users would migrate to a different browser, in enterprise this hasn't happened. The worst functionality in IE is the image plugin, let alone anything nice to have like videos. Images are a nightmare in Alloy Editor.
People can't create content that is anything other than one size black text without images. This is not rich text!! Worse the editor this thing is based on provides MORE features. So what's the point of Alloy Editor?
Attachments:
To Christoph's point,
TinyMCE and CK Editor. TinyMCE inside of DXP is riddled with bugs, as pointed out probably because nobody is using it within Liferay. Rebuilding AE on TinyMCE would make the most sense, call it a day with CK and find a better base editor ... or even better. Build your own editor.
The real issue though, is the philosophy of taking away editing features. It's no good to start again away from CK if the philosophy of Alloy Editor is not fixed. That's really what's broken. It was a nice vision to have only the features needed but dang it ... what you need from an editor is not what I need from an editor and what we need collectively is feature context.
Equity vs Equality ... right now we are all equal. We don't have the equity we need. I can increase the font size because I know HTML (and sometimes Anti Sammy will remove my skill anyway) but my users can't change font size without using heading tags, because that's the only way the editor provides. You can do it with look and feel but it will apply to the whole portlet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlXZyNtaoDM
I have to tell my users quite shamefully that no they can't center their text!! Oh you can't right or left align it either sorry, but you can use this workaround if you align an image to the center and delete it your text will then be centered ... but it's a bug so yeah. Sorry, we suck. Look at it from their point of view. Can you change the size of the text? No. Can you align the text? No. Can you change the color of the text? No. Can you select from a list of brand approved fonts? No. What can you do? Waste your time with formatting. Maybe use a table to move the text away from the image? Can you take the border off the table? Errrr No. Well what good is that then? Oh the table feature is buggy too. Can I change the padding around the image? Errr, no. Well what can I do? Can I create a call to action button? Errr No. So all I can do is add plain text? Yes. Oh you can also select some text and make it a link to Twitter. Twitter? I don't use Twitter.
I got the impression from one video from 2015 that even source code view wasn't needed? I believe that was Chema questioning why we would need such a silly feature (we do, source code view is the only way I can fix users content). If source code view gets taken away we will have to call it a day with Alloy.
It's the last choice in this list
https://handsontable.com/blog/articles/2017/8/11-best-rich-text-editors
TinyMCE usually comes out as the most recommended option, in this grid CK is Niche and TinyMCE is leader.
https://www.g2.com/categories/wysiwyg-editors
My first encounter with CK in Liferay was that our spell checker was giving us third party advertising in order to keep using the feature, in an enterprise product.
TinyMCE and CK Editor. TinyMCE inside of DXP is riddled with bugs, as pointed out probably because nobody is using it within Liferay. Rebuilding AE on TinyMCE would make the most sense, call it a day with CK and find a better base editor ... or even better. Build your own editor.
The real issue though, is the philosophy of taking away editing features. It's no good to start again away from CK if the philosophy of Alloy Editor is not fixed. That's really what's broken. It was a nice vision to have only the features needed but dang it ... what you need from an editor is not what I need from an editor and what we need collectively is feature context.
Equity vs Equality ... right now we are all equal. We don't have the equity we need. I can increase the font size because I know HTML (and sometimes Anti Sammy will remove my skill anyway) but my users can't change font size without using heading tags, because that's the only way the editor provides. You can do it with look and feel but it will apply to the whole portlet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlXZyNtaoDM
I have to tell my users quite shamefully that no they can't center their text!! Oh you can't right or left align it either sorry, but you can use this workaround if you align an image to the center and delete it your text will then be centered ... but it's a bug so yeah. Sorry, we suck. Look at it from their point of view. Can you change the size of the text? No. Can you align the text? No. Can you change the color of the text? No. Can you select from a list of brand approved fonts? No. What can you do? Waste your time with formatting. Maybe use a table to move the text away from the image? Can you take the border off the table? Errrr No. Well what good is that then? Oh the table feature is buggy too. Can I change the padding around the image? Errr, no. Well what can I do? Can I create a call to action button? Errr No. So all I can do is add plain text? Yes. Oh you can also select some text and make it a link to Twitter. Twitter? I don't use Twitter.
I got the impression from one video from 2015 that even source code view wasn't needed? I believe that was Chema questioning why we would need such a silly feature (we do, source code view is the only way I can fix users content). If source code view gets taken away we will have to call it a day with Alloy.
It's the last choice in this list
https://handsontable.com/blog/articles/2017/8/11-best-rich-text-editors
TinyMCE usually comes out as the most recommended option, in this grid CK is Niche and TinyMCE is leader.
https://www.g2.com/categories/wysiwyg-editors
My first encounter with CK in Liferay was that our spell checker was giving us third party advertising in order to keep using the feature, in an enterprise product.
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