New Features in Burning Board 4.1: New Editor (Part 2)
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WoltLab -
September 15, 2014 at 5:11 PM -
52,293 Views -
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Visual Quotes
Quotes are now rendered as closely as possible and can be easily worked with in the WYSIWYG-mode instead of facing a rather large BBCode which caused a lot of distraction. All the changes to the quick reply feature in Burning Board 4.0 and 4.1 were pointed towards a more realistic work-flow where your users type in their message and once submitted will be presented their message just like they saw it in the editor (sadly CKEditor wasn't cooperative, preventing us to do that with Burning Board 4.0). General speaking, we're looking forward to implement more visual representations for BBCodes in future releases.
If you click on the quote header, you'll be presented a small button to edit the quote, both the author and the link to the original source.
Neither the author nor the link to the source are mandatory for quotes and there are always reason why you would provide only a blank quote. In the final post the quote header is hidden in case there is nothing to display, but for usability reasons the system will show a pseudo header, allowing to add an author and a source at any time.
Drag & Drop
Burning Board 4.1 adds the ability to utilize the attachment system by dragging files from your local computer into the Redactor editor. The screenshot above shows the editor state once a file is being dragged over the browser window and shows the possible drop location.
Once the file is dragged right over the drop area, it will change its color from yellow to green along with an updated message being displayed. The updated visuals indicate that the editor is ready to receive the file and should aid less-experienced users to properly use the system.
The dropped file is directly uploaded using the attachment system and will be available for insertion once the upload has been completed.
Automatic Save
Losing a written message can have various different reasons, e.g. accidentally closing the tab or a full browser crash. Burning Board 4.1 adds an automatic save of messages to restore them once you open the editor again. These saves occur in the background every minute and utilize the browser's built-in localStorage, a persistent and website-specific storage.
This has a few advantages over saving it on the server:
- Saving on the server requires periodic requests, this creates an additional load on the server and a lot of hosting companies considers this a violation (treated as chats which are usually disallowed)
- Most plans for internet on mobile devices come with very low included bandwidth (and astronomical charges if you exceed it), even though every request is rather small, each save adds a small chunk on the pile which could grow big by the time
- Especially mobile devices can lose their network connectivity due to bad and/or unstable network coverage, storing the message on the local storage works regardless of this
- Some browsers on mobile devices limit periodic requests to save bandwidth, since all is done locally the automatic save will continue to work
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