Loomio

Improved formatting with markdown

PS Paul Smith Public Seen by 57
PS

Paul Smith Sat 4 Aug 2012 11:09PM

Background: https://trello.com/c/rFovhOID

There seems to be a bit of consensus on the idea of adding formatting to proposals/comments etc.

I did a bit of research into this while trying to learn integration tests and ended up in favour of Github style markdown as seen here:
https://github.com/mojombo/github-flavored-markdown/issues/1

If it's useful you can have a look at an example of redcarpet in loomio with these changes:
https://github.com/tixpaul/loomio/tree/feature/markdown

There's lots of different ways and styles to do this, if it's needed at all. Thoughts?

RDB

Richard D. Bartlett Sun 5 Aug 2012 4:18AM

This would make me so damn happy. Markdown is so beautiful.

JL

Jon Lemmon Sun 5 Aug 2012 11:01PM

Sweet. Can we use github-flavored markdown with redcarpet? I definitely think formatting for comments is necessary in the long-term, I'm just not entirely convinced on the best way to do it. Does github-flavored markdown provide everything we need? From a non-coder's perspective, would they find it easy-to-use? If we add in a WYSIWYG editor later on would it play nicely?

In terms of markdown... I do like github-flavored markdown better because it handles line-breaks nicely.

BK

Benjamin Knight Mon 6 Aug 2012 2:24AM

Any kind of markdown is all good with me

PS

Paul Smith Mon 6 Aug 2012 7:03AM

Ah the github flavoured markdown isn't as easy as a WYSIWYG however:

It is really intuitive, less tech savvy people will be put off only until they try it.

If we just embedded a cheatsheet help button I'm sure it wouldn't take long for people to adopt it.

I typed out a big rant about wysiwyg editors and their validation and sanitization problems butttt then I found MarkitUp.

http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/examples/markdown/

Apparently there's even a github repo with a tidy guide:
https://github.com/ZhangHanDong/rails_markitup

As far as whether it will do everything you need, I believe it's actually the same markdown engine Github actually uses (http://github.github.com/github-flavored-markdown/) and it's really flexible if there was something else that came up.

JL

Jon Lemmon Mon 6 Aug 2012 9:32AM

Ah sweet. That all looks good to me. And I think a cheat-sheet for now would do just fine.

CT

Chris Taklis Tue 25 Jun 2013 4:18PM

Maybe it is better with WYSIWYG or visual editor, so any member can use it easily.

RDB

Richard D. Bartlett Tue 25 Jun 2013 9:08PM

Totally agree @christaklis. My ideal comment box would have drag-and-drop images too.

I wonder if there are any good gems out there to handle this? If not we should build one!

MB

Matthew Bartlett Tue 25 Jun 2013 11:03PM

@richarddbartlett Jack_up looks like it could do the trick

CT

Chris Taklis Sun 15 Sep 2013 9:57AM

how is that going? because some members of my group asked again and again how to format their text.

Load More