Time to refactor the WYM source?

[mr_lundis]

Hi everyone!

First of all I'd like to say that you've done a really great job with WYMEditor. But for every new version, I feel stronger and stronger that it's time to refactor the WYM source.

You guys are constantly adding new features, witch is great, but the source is really getting harder and harder to read and understand. So therefore I would suggest that we to the next major release:

1. Come up with some kind of coding standard so that all code looks the same.
2. We walk through all the code and restructure it to:

a) Implement the new coding standard (obviously)
b) Get rid of all the global vars & functions.
c) Be able to make use of the already existing functions in jQurey, why reinvent the wheel?
d) Make the code more maintainable and easy to understand.
3. Document the code! There is very much undocumented alt. poorly documented code right now.

For those of you who are interested, here are some videos on the subject:

Douglas Crockford: "Quality":
http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=529579
Nicholas Zakas: "Maintainable JavaScript":
http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=568351

They're both from the YUI Theater:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/

I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this, and help out whenever I can during this process!

[misterm]

I sort of agree. I think it would be good to have a discussion on what issues matter to developers/users most.

- W3C HTML output (which it does)
- Better GUI control
(an easier way to define your own button layout. A lot of editors lack this)
- Better popup (url/insert image) control
(this would also make for easier customizing)

These are just to name a few and i'm merely going along with the former suggestion. I think it will make WYSIWYM even more attractive for developers. It would certainly cut down time in customization.

edit: came to think of it, it would be great to have some sort of dialogs folder so we can edit the code for say 'insert image' and make it a gallery if we would want to.

[magico]

Who are the team elements right now? Who is on charge and what can we do to have a new refactored version?

[rostr]

I haven't seen any updates on the site lately. I was actually getting concerned that wymeditor was no longer being developed.

Can one of the developers give everyone an update of where they are and what the roadmap might be? The official roadmap says 3 months late and records no progress, so i'm not sure we can go by that.

I'm afraid i'm not a javascript guru, so I can't contribute to the coding end, but i've been trying to contribute with bug reports,etc.

Would hate to see wymeditor die off...

[jfh]

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply, we've been very busy the last couple of months.
I can ensure you the project isn't dead - we (the dev team) needed a break, and we now have some time again to spend on it.

FYI, there will be some major changes in the project itself very soon, so we can spend more time on it - I'll give more explanations on my blog asap.

We'll then be able to refactor the code which - I agree - isn't perfect and lacks some documentation, and next improve the editor features.
Of course, any help is very welcome.

Thanks,

[tolano]

Isn't wymeditor a jquery plugin? Refactoring with the latest features of jquery would be a good thing, and it shouldn't be very hard.

IMHO,WYMeditor came with one of the greatest ideas of the web revolution known 2.0, but the project has some lacks.

One of the first things that should be included is a good and clean plugin support, and a good image manager. Getting this done with the actual features, could give Wemeditor a wide acceptation in a lot of blogs and CMS systems. This is only my opinion, and I'm only trying to help.

[mr_lundis]

FYI, there will be some major changes in the project itself very soon, so we can spend more time on it - I'll give more explanations on my blog asap.

I'm looking forward to it!

[jfh]

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