Suggestions Archive

2004.12.17

The recent changes should be able to list new comments as well, I need to see comments fast.

[Admin] Comments now appear in the recent changes list. Thanks for the suggestion! 

Definitely a spell checker.

[Admin] The new editor supports ieSpell (for Internet Explorer only). Google Toolbar also provides a spellchecker that works nicely with EditMe's editor.

One or more "insert" buttons, such as for username, date, etc., so that we can easily "sign" changes. My background is from TWiki (http://twiki.org/), which has many such conveniences.

Also noted that Safari, Mac OS X Panther does not display the edit box, so that such Mac users cannot add content.

[Admin] This is something that Safari needs to provide. Editor support is not something EditMe can add to Safari. Mac users can use Mozilla or Firefox. UPDATE: As of version 1.3, Safari now supports some of the Midas standard that allows the editor to work - close, but still not quite there yet.

A preview mode would be handy, rather than saving and having to re-edit.
[Admin] This has been considered, but in an environment where anyone can edit a page, a preview button would encourage people to go long stretches without saving, which increases the chance of lost content.

[Admin] The new editor has a Preview button.

A better explanation of user backups would be nice. I tried to ftp in, but was not successful.
[Admin] Profession and Premium plans now offer nighly user backup service. See this page.

cheers, drl

moving content from MS Word to editme is a pain because of the dreadful html that word uses. i'd love to have a feature that scrubbed the html, removing all stylesheet refs and other clutter. even better would be if the editor worked like dreamweaver - if you paste word content into dreamweaver's design view, the html is cleaned for you.

[Admin] While not a silver bullet, the new editor now contains the button, which attempts to clean up Word's garbage when pasting in; it does a pretty good job in most cases.

It would be good if people in different time zones could set their time, and have the server adjust times accordingly when showing Changes etc. Otherwise I am always operating in the future: good for the ego but a challenge to reality.

[Admin] (7/12) This is currently on our list of features to be added.  

Making link boxes work better in general, the following do not work:

Some CGI

Some weird port

Teeny Web Server in Java

Test Page. Very Interesting

Definantly something, who knows what?

My BBS

[Admin] This bug was fixed on 7/9/05. Thanks for pointing it out! 

It would be nice to have a comment for each attached file that is listed after the file.

[Admin] This feature now exists. Thanks for the suggestion! 

Image links that are added should be added in a relative format. If I have 3 domains requiring login pointing to the same site, an absolute reference may reference one of the others I haven't logged into yet, and thus be unable to retrieve the image.

[Admin] The new editor uses relative links for everything. 

Hierarchial comment system. Would be nice to be able to reply to a specific comment, thread style. When a lot of people have different thoughts about a topic, it's nice to be very clear about which one you are replying to.

[With a little wrangling, you can now implement any number of DHTML/Javascript menu systems using a plain text page and includes. 

It needs to be easier to determine what has changed on a page since the last time you viewed it. The comments system is nice, but sometimes on our larger documents, people have to open two versions of the doc side by side and scroll both of them to find what's different which is really annoying. It makes it tough for people to keep in sync with the 'flow' of the project.

What would be nice would be any or all of the following:

• Something similar to Site: Changes, but for changes since the user last logged in.
• The same functionality on a page level, a user can see what has changed on a page since he last viewed it. It would really be nice if it did something of a 'color coded diff' of the current revision of the page vs. the last revision the user looked at. It would also be nice if this link was sent out by the email system rather than to the raw current revision of the page.
• It would be nice if the emails would send out a list of all the comments made on the page since the last email instead of just the first.
• More granularity options on the email system would be nice. Options for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes and 1 hour would be greatly appreciated. When you've got a good brainstorm going, 2 hours is too long to wait to be notified that someone has added a thought.

It would be great if EditMe would add a column called "Description" to the list of files attached to a page. Currently, only the file name appears. That can be changed to a link with a separate link name, but it would be better to have a separate descriptive field for use by the person who uploads the file.

Update - I see that Mike made the same suggestion on June 5.

[admin] Attachment descriptions are planned.

Option to hide the list of attachments at bottom of a page

[admin] Each attachment can be individually shown or hidden. If all attachments on a page are hidden, no list will appear. See the attachments screen for any page and note the Hide checkbox.

[DavidRader] Yea, verily! thanks

David
Rader

Love this tool. I use the Twiki type Wiki at my work. There are some features of that that I really like that I don't see yet - some of my comments come from that background. I apologize if these are dupes of previous ones:

1. A breadcrumb trail at the top and bottom of the Wiki so I can remember where I am in the hierarchy.

2. Ability to configure Emailed (dailyweekly whatever) summaries of changes based on your preference.

3. Ability to configure permissions to public/registered/admin users per page, where there are defaults to the general setting at first. If you don't have permission to see the page, don't show the link or give a nice permission denied page.

4. I also keep clicking the Edit link under the Menu section when I really want to edit the current page. It is in a place where I naturally want to click to edit the current page.

5. Ability to see which pages are referring to a page.

6. More examples of stylesheet applications would be great.

7. Ability to submit stylesheet themes (maybe ones that have gotten votes to be good enough to be included).

8. Maybe ability set up a banner area at the top and a bottom area at the bottom that you can edit separately and that are displayed on every page?

9. Allow for ' or " in the associated displayed name for a link. I wanted to make a What's Up type menu item, but can't.

[admin] Jenny, thanks for your suggestions. A few of these features currently exist, namely #2 (click Preferences after logging in) and #3 (look at the Security drop down while editing a page). There is a work around for #9, see" Using Alternate Link Text" at http://help.editme.com/InsertingLinks. As for #6 and 7, there is a Stylesheets page on this site, but no one has submitted any.

1. Allow administrators to see e-mail addresses of registered users. It is nice to have open registration but the admin wants to make sure everyone belongs. Sometimes I'll get a registered user who's username I don't recognize and it would be nice to send an e-mail checking them out.

[chris] Interested in feedback on this one. The thinking was that users will be more likely to register if they know that their email won't be used against their wishes. We are considering a site option to turn on email visibility. If turned on, the registration screen would display a message that their email can be viewed by the site admin - if off a message would indicate the protection of their email. If this option was turned on after users had registered with it off, their email would not be visible until a user indicated otherwise in their preferences after logging in. Seems kind of complicated... Thoughts?

[pvk] Sounds like a good fix. A lot depends on what a particular site is used for. For us as a church, we have a group with very minimal computer skills and high skepticism about online stuff. We use "registered view" for things like the church directory, yet at least initially I want to keep registration open for ease of use. Admin viewing e-mail wouldn't scare off our members because we already have that information, but it is important to know who is registered.

2. Many of our users don't "log in" before they check out pages because most are Public Viewing. Then they hit one they need to log in for, and hit the login screen and then login they are thrown back to the wiki home page instead of the page they were intending to see. It is a small annoyance to drill back down to where you were going but still a noticable one.

[chris] The login page should redirect the user to the page they tried to view. If it's not, open a support ticket and let us know how to see this behavior on your site.
[pvk] Just tried it and it worked right. I'll pay more attention because I thought it wasn't working. I'll try on different machines and browsers.

Separate security for the Main Menu so people can't mess it up by mistake.

[matt] Scott, just use the Security dropdown when editing the Menu page - set it to Public View, Admin Edit.

[scott] Oh, yeah. I forgot. Hey, Matt, you might want to do that for this wiki's menu. It was wrecked this morning. I recovered it from a prior version! That was neato.

[matt] Done. Why didn't I think of that before?? I've gotten used to restoring the menu from edits gone bad on a weekly basis. :)

[scott] I've noticed before that I tend to hit the Edit tool for the menu many times when I meant to hit the page edit. Something about its placement, causes the eye to go straight for the first Edit it sees in that area.

Two things that are tripping me up. . .I'd like to create a button that inserts a Username/Date stamp. We have a lot of interaction among users on pages and I'd like to make it easy to keep track.

1. Is the username available to JScript anywhere, an environment variable or something?

2. I thought the edit window was a form field, but I've learned it's controlled by the browser. Is there some way to target this in JScript? As it is I've had to hack it - I put in some code that copies the date to the windows clipboard, then users control-V it in. But needless to say that's a little clunky.

[matt] This can't be accessed since you can't edit the Edit screen.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

-- Dave

It would be great if this public site had an area for publishing tips and techniques for both using Editme and HTML/CSS in general. I'd be happy to contribute as much as I can. Plus, I'd enjoying seeing how other users are using Editme.

[matt] Go nuts! This kind of content is welcome here. For what it's worth, nobody has gone as far as you have with CSS formatting.

[scott] You got it! New CSS Tips page. Just go to the main Stylesheets page and look for the CSS Tips and Techniques link.

When inserting graphics using an attachment, it would be great if the editor calculated the "width" and "height" attributes of the IMG element. Also, if there were some way to specify the Alt attribute.
I used Mozilla 1.6 to enter BTW. New editor is working great.

[matt] Scott, you can, of course, set these attributes in the source view ().

Wow, some big improvements. Glad to see it. One problem. I work with the Toggle HTML Source button alot because I tend to work with HTML directly. I'm using DHTML Javascript Calendar 2.0 and when I click the Toggle button to work the HTML, it only shows me part of it. If I cancel and do it again, I see even less of the code - So I'm not gonna hit that submit button. Sorry. Right now I've only got the calendar working on my private site. I'll try to post an example on my public site as soon as I can.

[matt] This is a bug with the new editor. I'm working on a solution.

Nice new editor. Would be nice to have Undo and Redo
[skmurphy] The backward & forward arrows on menu Undo and Redo

International menus. What is your recommendation? I've found three, not so good, ways of solving this:

1) Use one site for each language. Expensive.
2) Use one menu column for each language. See http://sprakservice.editme.com. Waste of real estate.
3) Move the menu to the page. 10 pages means 3x10 menus. Too much editing.

I would like to inform you that I, in spite of all my suggestions, am very satisfied with your product. If there is no perfect way of allowing international menus, don't implement it. It is very important to keep editing as simple as possible. Probably is 1) the way to go, would make Index look best.

I can't understand the difference: Click the page title to view the most recent version. Click a version number to view the edited version. Rewrite?

[matt] Clicking the Title gives you the most recent version of that page. Clicking the version number shows you that version number, so that if later versions were created, you can see what that user entered at that time.

Allow the complete contents of a wiki including version history to be backed up by the administrator of the wiki by downloading it, and documenting the format. I am reluctant to get locked in to a particular wiki provider, so this would make it possible to move my content if I had to.

By the way, I like the WYSIWYG editor and icons. Much nicer than learning a mark up language like _italic_ *bold*, etc.

[matt] Thanks for the input. This functionality is in the works. Until that feature is live, an easy work-around is to use Internet Explorer or any of the freely available Site Mirroring tools to make a copy of your wiki on your local hard disk as a backup.

Please think hard about releasing your work as open source. You will get so much help and we'll all have better software, faster. If someone paid you $50,000 to put this in the public domain, would you do it? (so we, and everyone else can use it and improve it!) No doubt many people would want to hire you for set-up and consulting and ongoing support. Contact me please! -Nate Johnson, n_johnson@yahoo.com betterdifferent.com

Create a remember me feature (store username/password in a cookie if checked)

[matt] Done!

To protect against bots automating your site to death you can do things like only allow X number of edits per minute - this will discourage bots. Fotolog was recently attacked by a 14yo who posted 1/2 million messages before they had to implement something like this.

[matt] I'd be interested in ideas of how to implement this technically. Using session would be easy to get around (just make your script ignore session cookies). Using IP address could block out an IP that represents thousands of users. Any other ideas?

Allow Admins to set a "restore point" which would allow them to roll back to the state the site was in when they set it at a latter date (vandal protection).

[matt] Professional plans now have a user downloadable backup which can be restored in case of catastrophic vandalism.

Add a "back up now" link that would allow the user to download something that would be, more or less, a backup.

[matt] See above. Professional Plans have a nightly user downloadable backup.

Conceptually, I guess I am beginning to see this working, however, there are a lot of non-intuitive things going on, most of which are linked to this edit window (which I understand is not something you rolled yourself). The html is really strange (like wouldn't you think that when you have a br-tag that would be where the line break shows up?), when viewing even this table in WYSIWYG mode, it is intuitive to hit tab to get from the date field to the description field (not to go to the save button). Also, is there any way to sort alphabetically in a page? Expl: I created a 'for. langs. for foodies' on ben's recipe site, but once I have entered 30 words and definitions, am I going to have to order them all myself, or if others enter ones, will I have to rearrange them? The icons for this edit window aren't very intuitive either (i.e. how would I need to know that I need to put my curser in the top row and then hit the 'insert row before' button?) feel free to paraphrase my comments

[matt] I'd be interested in anyone else that finds the editor so unusable... I find it pretty standard UI, and the HTML, while not necessarily valid, is correct and repeatable (it's generated by your browser, by the way, which houses this editor component). I agree on the tab thing... an annoyance. Table sorting would be nice... something to consider but a fair amount of work to integrate it into the editor for not a real big gain.

I don't know what these are 'officially called' but especially for new users, having 'tool tips' or 'alt-text' on action menu links

[matt] Done.