slate blog

One of the earliest decisions we made when we started development on slate was to use Textile (well, RedCloth really) as our method for formatting content as opposed to a WYSIWYG like FCKEditor . It’s been an interesting ride since then. We’ve been using Textile now for about 8 months and we’ve learned a number of lessons. Not only with Textile but also the cross-over between it and Snippets. Based on these “lessons learned” we plan on releasing an interesting Textile/WYSIWYG hybrid with our next release coming in mid-March. So what did we learn?

• Run the edge version of RedCloth. Auto break tags and auto linking are huge. They make life infinitely easier. So grab it. Luckily why is already working on the next version of RedCloth.
• Remove the gsub for subscript using ~’s. At WVU we still have a lot of sites that use tildes as part of their URL. RedCloth will butcher them. Users shouldn’t have to know the ASCII equivalent to put in a link. That being said, you’re giving up subscript.
• Tables absolutely suck with Textile. Maybe I’ve never personally gotten the hang of it. I know you can do colspans and all that kind of stuff but… that’s getting a bit esoteric even for me.
• There’s a big difference between typing content and copy & pasting content. A lot of our users so far are copy & pasting from old sites into new ones in slate. Formatting in this scenario is really awkward. This is one area where highlighting a block of text and clicking a WYSIWYG button or alt-something would be beneficial.
• Our implementation of snippets is flawed. Basically it’s that snippets is sort of hidden that’s the problem. That and the fact that there are weird cross-overs where a user should use snippets as opposed to textile though textile works as well.
• Previewing is awkward. While we have a preview pane in the content editor all it gives you is a general idea of what your content looks like. The stylesheet for your theme might define an h2 as maroon and 50px tall… you won’t see that in the preview pane because we don’t load your stylesheet there.
• Users can & will learn Textile. Yes, it’s a little tricky at first but once people realize how much they don’t have to mark-up and wouldn’t have marked up with some WYSIWYG Textile loses a bit of it’s mysteriousness. Maybe I’m delusional on this so feel free to chime in on the comments but I haven’t heard the blood-curdling screams that I expected when we tell people to use Textile.

Like I said, we’ve learned a lot and hopefully this next release can answer some of our issues. Have thoughts on Textile in slate or in general? Drop us a comment.