Forem Creators and Builders 🌱

Discussion on: Feature update: Markdown toolbar

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ildi profile image
Ildi • Edited

A very welcome feature update, thank you Forem Team! It's awesome that the new toolbar is also available on mobile.

What are your thoughts about also bringing the markdown toolbar to the comment form?

Another thought I had when testing: once liquid tags have been unified, it would be useful to integrate embeds in the markdown toolbar as well. I believe this would make a big difference, as right now I find myself clicking the Liquid Tags link in the Editor Basics to copy the liquid tag syntax im trying to use. The toolbar option would be a quicker experience compared to manually typing them out. Admitingly it's also a bad habit that I have now formed and should learn to break.

I noticed that the new toolbar includes a link to the editor guide. I think this should open to a new page. Right now if you click it opens on the same page, and if you go back, you get a blank gray page (this is prob a bug). You have to refresh again in order to realize that you have not lost the written content in the editor.

Forem toolbar screenshot

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lee profile image
Lee

I think upload image is missing from mobile, will double check again

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ildi profile image
Ildi

It’s there but you have to swipe left on the toolbar to see it.

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amyatforem profile image
Amy Lin

Hi Ildi - thanks for the great feedback!

What are your thoughts about also bringing the markdown toolbar to the comment form?

Great question! Yes, we do plan to bring the toolbar to the comment area after we polish the toolbar in the editor for a while first.

it would be useful to integrate embeds in the markdown toolbar as well.

This is actually also part of the plan. πŸ˜‰

I noticed that the new toolbar includes a link to the editor guide. I think this should open to a new page.

Thanks for reporting this! This is an oversight from our side and will be fixed shortly ;-)

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ildi profile image
Ildi

Awesome stuff, looking forward to these updates πŸ₯³

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varhal profile image
Varhal • Edited

Hey! I think the easiest way to use liquid tags is to replace them with something like this github.com/discourse/onebox.

How it works:
The user simply inserts a link to twitter, facebook, youtube, etc. into a post or comment. and this link automatically turns into a liquid tag.

Like that:

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amyatforem profile image
Amy Lin

Hey Varhal - thanks for the reference.

What you have brought up has also been discussed internally! While this is an easy, intuitive way to add embeds, we do think we still want to respect the author's decision on whether they want to add a link or turn it into an embed. So unless anything changed or some other good reasons suggest against it, I think we are going into this direction :-)

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varhal profile image
Varhal

Hey, @amyatforem !

If the author does not want to convert the link into a block, there are two ways:

  1. Asking the user if he wants to turn into a block

  2. Convert into a block and give the opportunity to cancel, add a cross

Example from notion.so

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amyatforem profile image
Amy Lin

I think we are in sync, @varhal πŸ˜‚

This is exactly one of the options we have discussed, in terms of how to realize the vision - essentially turn links into embeds automatically, but provide a quick way to revert it back to a link effortlessly. So yes - we would definitely consider that! Thank you for your wonderful feedback.