PublicLab.Editor

Please contact [email protected] to get involved! We'd love to make this editor compatible with other platforms.

PublicLab.Editor is a general purpose, modular JavaScript/Bootstrap UI library for rich text posting, which provides an author-friendly, minimal, mobile/desktop (fluid) interface for creating blog-like content, designed for PublicLab.org (itself an open source project).

PublicLab.Editor provides author-friendly interfaces for:

• titling
• main image uploading
• text body editing using Woofmark (markdown/WYSIWYG)
• tagging
• edit history

We may include an extensible API for adding custom content modules, for example:

• coauthoring: "add co-authors"
• "post a response" buttons
• event data (calendar selector, RSVP)
• related content selection: "this work is a response to post X"
• geotagging: "Use the map to show where this happened"
• data embedding: "Paste data here and choose a chart style" (via Chart.js?)

Some, or many of the above may be optionally based on Public Lab Powertags. We may also include:

• client-side validation

Design process

Design updates are viewable on PublicLab.org.

You can try a very early, rough prototype here:

https://publiclab.github.io/PublicLab.Editor/examples/

Modules

The editor is built from different modules like:

• TitleModule
• MainImageModule
• EditorModule
• TagsModule
• HistoryModule
• RichTextModule

Each manages its own UI and validation, and which report their contents via a module.value() method. The EditorModule encapsulates all the modules. It contains a WYSIWYG textarea, managed (by default) by Woofmark.

To input content into a module, the convention is to use that module's value() method, like this:

editor.richTextModule.value('hello there'); // sets the richTextModule's content

You can also use module.value() as a getter, like this:

var content = editor.richTextModule.value(); // get the richTextModule's content

editor.richTextModule.value(content + ' and then some'); // sets the richTextModule's content

To add a new field, or new behavior, extend PublicLab.Module or customize an existing module by extending it -- for example:

PublicLab.Module.extend({
  init: function(_editor) {

    this._super(_editor);

  }
});

Module output is collected (by editor.collectData()) in the editor.data object -- a collection of values based on each module.key, assigning the value of module.value() to that key. So a module with a key of nid, for example, which returned 6 from module.value(), would result in editor.data being:

{
  nid: 6
}

Because of this, each module must have a key property and a value() method. Some modules, like the TagsModule, will return their own value added to the existing value of key, so that multiple modules may add to the tags property of editor.data.

Installation

To install PublicLab.Editor for development, you'll need NodeJS. You can get the detailed instruction on installing node and npm in its official documentation.

After installing node and npm run npm install from the root directory.

PublicLab.Editor uses grunt - the javascript task runner for compilation of the modules. To install grunt run npm install -g grunt-cli. You may have to use sudo for root privileges.

Make changes to the files in the /src/ directory, then run grunt build to compile into /dist/PublicLab.Editor.js. This will use grunt-browserify to concatenate and include any node modules named in require() statements. You'll then be able to try it out in /examples/index.html. Run grunt and leave it running to build as you go.

You can also run grunt debug to have grunt-browserify to include Source Maps for easy debugging. This way you can locate the module from where the error is generating. This is for use in development only.

Setup

To use PublicLab.Editor, you'll need to follow the template provided here, and use the following constructor:

var editor = new PL.Editor({ 
  textarea: document.getElementById('my-textarea'),
  destination:        "/notes/create",   // content will Submit to this URL upon clicking "Publish"
  data: { // prepopulate fields:
    title:           "Your post title",
    body:            "Your post content",
    tags:            "nice,cool"
  }
});

To customize the @author and #tag autocompletes with your own suggestions, or with AJAX calls to your server, see the autocomplete example in /examples/autocomplete.html.

The editor toolbar comes in two differnt formats. You can use a smaller version by using a size property in the constructor. Refer to example given in /examples/comment.html

Dependencies

As of v1, PublicLab.Editor requires jQuery to be included on the page, and some external jQuery plugins for the TagsModule and MainImageModule:

<script src="../node_modules/jquery/dist/jquery.min.js"></script>

<!-- required for TagsModule -->
<script src="../node_modules/typeahead.js/dist/typeahead.jquery.js"></script>
<script src="../node_modules/typeahead.js/dist/bloodhound.js"></script>
<script src="../node_modules/bootstrap-tokenfield/dist/bootstrap-tokenfield.js"></script>

<!-- required for MainImageModule -->
<script src="../node_modules/blueimp-file-upload/js/vendor/jquery.ui.widget.js"></script>
<script src="../node_modules/blueimp-file-upload/js/jquery.iframe-transport.js"></script>
<script src="../node_modules/blueimp-file-upload/js/jquery.fileupload.js"></script>

These used to be compiled into PublicLab.Editor but are now external so that jQuery does not get included twice when using the editor in a page which already has `jQuery.

Server

PublicLab.Editor expects a response from the server upon sending a request to destination that is a URL which it will follow.

Creating a mock server

• Testing image upload and other features that depend on an interactive server is difficult with just a basic one-line webserver. Instead, you can set up the plots2 project as explained here to see the Editor working interactively while you test out those features.

• Clone plots2 and follow the Standard Installation instructions to run it on your local server.

• Now in plots2/package.json# at line 62, replace this line with "publiclab-editor": "file:..<path>" where <path> is path of your cloned PublicLab.Editor repo folder

• Now with passenger start you can access the Editor at localhost:3000/post. Make changes in Editor's source code and run grunt build or grunt debug to bundle all files. Then run yarn install --force in plots2 repo to view changes on server.

• For reflecting HTML changes use plots2/app/views/editor/rich.html.erb instead of example.html. They both have same sturcture.

• For reflecting the changes on the local server need to run yarn install --force and refresh your page.

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Modules

Various modules have different configurable options to be added to the options object, as seen in the Integration section.

Rich Text Module

formats -- provide an array of strings specifying allowed file extensions that may be uploaded inline in the rich text input area:

var editor = new PL.Editor({ 
  textarea: document.getElementById('my-textarea'),
  richTextModule: {
    formats: ['xml', 'pdf', 'csv', 'stl']
  }
});

Tags Module

The Tags module uses Bootstrap Tokenfield. To add tags after initialization, use:

editor.tagsModule.el.find('input').tokenfield('createToken', 'purple');

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Developers

Help improve Public Lab software!

To report bugs and request features, please use the GitHub issue tracker provided at https://github.com/publiclab/PublicLab.Editor/issues

For additional support, join the Public Lab website and mailing list at http://publiclab.org/lists or for urgent requests, email [email protected]

• Join the '[email protected]' discussion list to get involved
• Look for open issues at https://github.com/publiclab/PublicLab.Editor/issues
• We're specifically asking for help with issues labelled with help-wanted tag
• Find lots of info on contributing at http://publiclab.org/wiki/developers
• Review specific contributor guidelines at http://publiclab.org/wiki/contributing-to-public-lab-software
• Some devs hang out in http://publiclab.org/chat (irc webchat)

Testing

Automated tests are an essential way to ensure that new changes don't break existing functionality, and can help you be confident that your code is ready to be merged in. We use Jasmine for testing: https://jasmine.github.io/2.4/introduction.html

To run tests, open /test.html in a browser. If you have phantomjs installed, you can run grunt jasmine to run tests on the commandline.

You can find the installation instructions for phantomjs in its official build documentation. For Ubuntu/debian based system you can follow these instructions or use the script mentioned there.

To add new tests, edit the *_spec.js files in /spec/javascripts/.

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Integration

Connect this editor to a parent server-side app, such as PublicLab.org or other servers.

The API we'll be working from will include several server URLs, which we'll be building into the file at src/adapters/PublicLab.Adaptors.js:

• publishing by POST (CREATE) to /notes/create (will go to plots2's notes_controller.rb#create)
• updating by UPDATE to /notes/update (will go to plots2's notes_controller.rb#update)
• uploading images by POST to /images/create (will go to plots2's images_controller.rb#create)

Tags integration

The TagsModule uses Bloodhound for tag suggestions. It can make GET requests to the server to fetch recent tag suggestion, which returns data in json format like /tags/recent.json. You can also give your own suggestions in an array. Refer to the example given in /examples/autocomplete.html.

RichText integration

Similarly the RichText module (which wraps the Woofmark adaptor) may make GET requests to:

• fetch relevant tags from /tags/related.json with whatever relevant content to base "relatedness" on
• fetch relevant authors from /authors/<foo>.json with <foo> being the typeahead stub, like @jyw for @jywarren

These can be overridden within the options in a richTextModule object, like:

var editor = new PL.Editor({ 
  textarea: document.getElementById('my-textarea'),
  richTextModule: {
    tagsUrl:    '/tags.json',
    authorsUrl: '/authors.json'
  }
});

Title integration

The TitleModule can make requests to find "related" content and suggest it be attached. Documentation on this can be found at:

https://github.com/publiclab/PublicLab.Editor/blob/master/src/modules/PublicLab.TitleModule.Related.js

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Compatibility

PublicLab.Editor uses jQuery 1.7+ or 2, and tests run on Node v5+. Other versions depended on are noted in the package.json file.