[Phpwebsite-developers] htmlArea and phpWS

[George B. <gbr...@lu...>]

I am currently using hmtlArea 3.0 beta on a fairly large school site (phpWS
0.9.3-3), and applaud the idea that it might be incorporated in phpWS 0.9.4.
I've had a few difficulties, though, and thought I'd note them for the
record here.
1.  Macintosh Mozilla (I know, you guys disdain Macs.  But my school has
lots of iBooks and I have a TiBook.) opens the various popups (text color,
for example) BEHIND the main window.  It takes a second click to show them.
2.  Mac Mozilla 1.6 crashes on editing text with an embedded image; 1.7
doesn't.  Who knows why.  I've simply disabled the image embedding control,
since most places it makes sense already provide for adding an image.
3.  The cut, copy and paste controls cannot be enabled in Mac Mozilla (and
maybe other versions too).  That's okay, really; people should use the key
controls anyway.
4.  I have not yet found a way to enable two text areas to be edited by
htmlArea on the same page -- only one actually delivers its results on
Submit.  And since the technique kindly supplied on www.phpwebsitemanual.com
for installing htmlArea replaces ALL text areas on a page with htmlAreas if
only one is desired, one is stuck not using htmlArea at all on pages with
more than one text area.  (Sometimes you can replace one text area with a
text field, but that requires modifying the module code, something I don't
like to do.)  There's quite a bit of conversation about this problem on the
forum at interactivetools, but no solution readily applies to phpWS in my
opinion.
5.  Only those modules which already employ the standard phpWS wysiwyg
buttons can have htmlArea installed by the technique mentioned above.
Adding htmlArea to other modules thus requires (minor) modifications to
module code.  (The essence is that the module must use
PHPWS_WizardBag::js_insert(), which normally inserts the JavaScript for the
regular buttons.)
6.  Any effort to customize or improve htmlArea requires an understanding
far exceeding mine of high-level object-oriented JavaScript.  I limp along
in PHP/MySQL and minimal JavaScript, so I don't know what to do when a
window opens behind, for example.

Some of the above can surely be overcome in a more extensive phpWS
implementation; I have all the faith in the world in the development team!
Others remain sticky.  But htmlArea is the best I've found, and I'm sticking
with it, at least for the moment.

George
______________________________________
George Brackett, Principal
George Brackett Associates
617 413 4316 / gbr...@lu...
http://www.luceatlux.com/gba/