Return of the ES wiki!

In March you seemed to think raising $$ wasn’t needed.

“Thank you for your offer. I know you guys want to give back and we will revisit the idea of an organized fund in the future, and on another thread.


Right now, the best you could do is buy something from grin. Grin pays for a majority of the forum upkeep and asks for nothing in return, and has never even nudged in the direction of influencing content here. Our community could not ask to be in better hands. They're the ultimate reason ES is still commercial influence free and operated by people who are passionate about our topic.


The second best thing you can do is help me out by offering constructive criticism and your perspective as we start showing demos of our new wiki software and forum software. I often do not get good feedback and end up guessing what the community wants. I eventually do something a part of the community doesn't want and get hammered for it. This is not a good situation for me, i want to make sure i am hitting on what people want. Receiving verbal abuse drains my battery. “

Certain things didn't go according to plan.
Nerdpress will get built one way or another though.

Let me get together a demo soon so you can try it and see if you think it's worth putting money into for the features ES needs.

Please add me to your list of persons interested in both doing beta testing and providing some level of financial support.

Thanks ^_^

Working on getting that demo ready next week as we speak.

It's Wednesday. I not sure we will get a public beta going by the end of this week because there is a code cleanup phase, bug squishing phase, and visual cleanup phase needed. I'd rather show a good demo instead of just a demo.

The great news is that the hierarchy on the left is fully working ( with a few non-showstopper bugs ), and you can right click to modify folders, add new ones, drag articles or folders to different folders, etc quite well. I would say it's functionally 80% similar to using a windows or mac file explorer and we want to get it up to 100% so that we have a zero degree learning curve on the navigation side to match the excellent functionality of ckeditor on the right. :thumb:

We can't wait to give ES a poke at it. Stay tuned.

Not much to report yet.. but we've decided to throw CKEditor out replace it with Froala even if CKE will give us an open source license. This represents a little plot twist that will set us back.. but we are all about investing in the long term future of this software.

The reason being is that if nerdpress is ever used for commercial purposes, a separate CKEditor license must be purchased, and that cost can range from $67 - $12,000/year according to their sales people.

But with Froala, i get the same functionality and once $3000 is spent on the license, they could care less about what i do with it. Much better terms!

We are also working out the bugs on the windows file explorer-like navigation menu ( drag and drop etc )
So we are a little further off from a public demo, and i will not set a date on that.



I've done a bit of visual cleanup and put a lot of content in my own installation thus far.. and realized that the menu density needed to go up a lot.. and now quite a bit can fit on a tablet or small laptop screen.



The bottom portion of this screen could be compacted a lot in the example of a small laptop screen and allow for a much taller editor interface. I would like the editor interface to always be at least 75% of the screen.



In the viewer, the header for the article is now sticky and remains at the top of the article you're scrolling through.



I am kicking around a few concepts for the logo and this is the strongest one so far:



( and yes, we'll use an ES logo instead of the nerd )

More later.

We're finally getting to the point where the majority of bugs are out of the navigation menu and we have >95% similarity in functions as windows file explorer ( even little things like, if you drag and drop a folder or article into another folder, and hold the drag there, the folder will expand )

Getting the nav menu working as expected was about 60x harder than expected! ( the javascript is wildly complex )



It needs some visual cleanup after that and it should be ready to demo afterwards.
No time promises but i can say we're actually damn close.

FYI; took a break on this project for a bit because of licensing disagreements with CKEditor. ( the WYISWYG editor component nerdpress relies on )

We didn't provide a public preview knowing that a fundamental key piece could be totally different.

2 other WYSIWYG editors, 1 free, 1 relatively cheap ( $800 ) have emerged that fit the strict requirements for user friendliness. Both provide improved editing features for wiki-like applications as a bonus.

After we are done with the xenforo move, i'm running a pilot project of both of these WYSIWYG editors to see if we can get nerdpress past the previous software licensing wall, and will report back.

Quick update.

The $800 wonder library ( Jodit ) has turned out to be good so far and i think it would be a good fit for the new wiki engine.
Here it is with ALL the options turned on... it even allows you to insert a random emoji into a document... very nice



I will most certainly be reworking the icons to be as nice as the much more expensive CKEditor:



Luckily the functionality is on point!

One thing Jodit can't do right: allow the user to copy and paste HTML from a forum post and expect the formatting/images/etc to fully survive the transfer. This is something i expect ESers will do a lot.
I am going to see if i can work with the developer to enable this ability, but if he cannot add it, maybe the ES Dev team will.

Sure beats the prospect of paying ~$8000 per year for CKEditor.. can't afford that here!

The plan for ES' use of nerdpress:

1. Implement a way in nerdpress to toggle the expensive CKEditor vs the inexpensive Jodit library so that we can test both and see what features need to be added to Jodit for ES' uses, then add them. This should be done in 30-60 days.

2. Public demo round for ES, probably in March.

3. If people like it, start a public crowdfunding round to raise $5000 to build custom features for ES, multi-user capability, and a very nice integration.

..that's the plan for now.. more to come.