Tumblr Post Editor
Soliciting thoughts. As usual, feel free to mix and match and even rant.
- What do you love?
- What do you hate?
- What's one feature they can take away over your dead body?
- What's one issue you'd ""literally"" pay them to fix? (not just code bugs, features that are frustrating to use also count)
- What's one feature you'd ""literally"" pay then to add?
- Which service has your favorite text editor? What do you like about it? (Alternatively: just tell me about other text editors you use)
A DISCLAIMER OF SORTS:
I'm not someone who posts publicly very much but I do enjoy creating (private) posts on here. More importantly, I’m not sure I’m exactly bobaboard’s target demographic—following mostly because I think it's a great project—but I hope my rambling can be useful in some way despite that, even just as an example of what your users might not need or want.
I’ll be talking mainly about the new NPF editor, as I've been using it for a while now and have liked it so much that I have gone out of my way to brainstorm ideas for posts just so I could use it again.
What I love
What I think the NPF post editor does very well is allow users to combine content blocks in whichever order they want. It’s much more fun to post things when you have control over how they look. I have also found it very rewarding to create themes for it and see the blocks working in different constellations. On a more meta level I also like the public github repo and the discussions on open issues there.
I also enjoy the way different paragraph types each have a theme or use; I think it's a good compromise between still allowing themes to be unique while giving the dashboard a bit more uniformity. Also copied text from another post getting automatically pasted as a blockquote block.
I like that the formatting options for the trail or children of a post are not more limited than those of the parent post.
What I hate
- I think the image limit should be around 20, rather than 10.
- I dislike that posting audio is tied to streaming.
- While I like the idea different paragraph types, I miss the HTML editor very much, especially the free color choices.
- The <pre> html tag being merged with the “chat” post type into one “monospace” block, when it’s not guaranteed that chat blocks will be monospaced on every theme (besides the fact that code and dialogue are very different things).
- I wish they didn’t mash headings and large text sizes together (iirc the block types are named “heading1” and “heading2” in the json respectively), and allowed more nesting (h1 to h6)
- I wound like the ability to nest things again; “large” or “chat” or “quote” blocks inside “blockquote” blocks and nested lists!
- I miss <hr> lines. With how few images one can use per post it sucks to have to waste them on spacing paragraphs
One feature they can take away over my dead body
The HTML editor, which they have already done. RIP me.- Image hosting and the flexible image grid.
One Three issues I'd "literally" pay them to fix
Wonkyness in NPF rendering, but that is an NPF-specific issue (and it's still in beta anyways). I guess in general I want the documentation of the site’s code to be up-to-date and explain how it wants me to render things; such as best practices for what html tag to use for each block type.
Right now adding alt text to images is very annoying and easy to forget, especially on the website, because it deletes it on every edit (the app doesn't).
Tags aren't editable and as someone that regulary hits the character limit on tags this is very frustrating. Also tags auto-breaking on ".
One Two features I'd "literally" pay them to add
- Another text color option with a color wheel for unlimited custom colors (and less garish ones especially)
- The ability to add ARIA-labels or role attributes to elements
My favorite text editors and what I like about them
I don't have a specific favorite, but
- I will love any editor that supports many HTML tags.
- The option to use grids/flexbox-type blocks is one of my favorite things about the Tumblr editor.
- I am always happy to see an HTML preview option that doesn't open in a new page or allows switching between HTML and Rich Text editors without losing formatting.
- Some editors let you swap images without deleting the image element, so alt text and formatting stays consistent. I think the editor on EA's help forums does that. (Never would have thought I'd use that one as a positive example lol)
- HTML > Rich Text > Markdown always
- When it comes to Markdown I really prefer the editor to come with a cheat sheet, because I personally always mix them up.
- AO3's incredibly bare-bones editor still tells me which HTML tags it supports, and I love it for that.
So yeah. Hope this was useful in some way at least.
Sorry for the length. orz
This is absolutely amazing!! Now you got me curious about the NPF specification. When you talked about theming, I was hoping that their renderer (i don't even dare to hope for the editor) would be open source too rather than just the specification.
But all this definitely gets me excited cause the way Boba renders Tumblr embeds right now is through their actual embeds code (which sucks and is wonky) but MAYBE i can get a NPF => Boba format translator done. Not that they won't kill my API keys if I get too trigger happy with it though.
Thank you, again! Super interesting.
You're welcome, I'm glad it was useful. :)
If I understood cyle correctly, there might be considerations to open source the NPF to HTML renderer? I'm not holding my breath but we'll see.
As long as you can get the full NPF JSON it should be possible. I don't remember using anything not also available through the API to build the NPF object.
Ooh I like Cyle. Now I want to hit them up here to ask more.
