Editor for CSS and Templates. This is an important feature!!

[seadragon]

Hi!
I joined CMSMS since some week and i think it's really good... but developing my first website based on CMSMS i realized that there is a really big boring obstacle that SLOW DOWN significatively the development. The problem is the CSS and TEMPLATE editor!

I think just you simply cannot use a banal and featureless TEXTAREA to edit CSS and HTML templates! Sure i say NO to WISYWIG but i think that something as to be able to:
- Press the TAB to indent the code
- Colorize the code
- [optional] show fast link to insert existing tags in the code without write manually it

***SHOULD***  be absolutely implemented and as soon as possible.

I think that the speed of setting up a site with a CMS is the MAIN feature that made CMS (in general) so useful!
CMSMS is really quick and smart and it is ideal for small-medium website as you can setup it in minutes... but effectively if you want to setup a custom layout it oblige you
- to open an EXTERNAL text editor (also non-WISYWIG  and not visual editor)
- to test the layout in a fake html and css file in local
- to re-edit the CSS and HTML replacing urls, path and some other with TAGS etc...
- upload images and css linked material trough online FILE MANAGER
- to submit modification only online (so loosing the useful "backside of the medal" of having a local fake html+css that could be VERSIONED on svn or other)

and ALL THIS could not be done IN MINUTES!! Doing this you loose much more time.

I think that all this could be done using a DE-FEATURED wisywig editor that offer the possibility to extract the TEXT (and not the HTML) inserted (if i remember correctly, trought js api, fck editor had a similar feature)

*** I'M ABSOLUTELY ADVERSE to have a full wisywig editor for the template editor. i don't want to have a preview of the website in live! I'm in favout of the webmaster know-how i want to have simply a better CODE editor ***

Sorry for my really poor english. I hope that this topic will be a good start to improve CMSMS.

[Dr.CSS]

There are some other editors you can use for this that integrate into cmsms, there is also template externalizer...

On a personal note, I've been developing templates/css for CMS Made Simple for over 4 years, which is my full time job, and have never felt the need for any type of editor such as you ask for...

[uniqu3]

Try EditArea Module.

[seadragon]

On a personal note, I've been developing templates/css for CMS Made Simple for over 4 years, which is my full time job, and have never felt the need for any type of editor such as you ask for...

Wow, so you press for each row, 4 times the space bar each time you need to indent of 1 level?
If so, i thing you  are very very good, but i bet you will save much more time using an editor that allow you to press the TAB to indent a line...

I agree that code colorization isn't a crucial feature... but it can improve significatively the code-legibility .

Quick button to insert the available TAGS would be a great saving time feature as beginner of cmsms (as me) and webmaster that use CMSMS occasionally or only for certain site (while use other bigger cms for other jobs).

Try EditArea Module.

That was just what i was searching for!


THANK YOU TO BOTH for the help!
anyway i will try to suggest the quick-tag-button feature to the author of EditArea module...

Just a thing (little OT).
I read that in CMSMS v2 will be implemented the versioning system. Will  this versioning be implemented also for templates and CSS? Or only the contents (pages etc) will be versioned?

[Jaro]

CMS MS is fantastic, but the internal editor didn't fit my requirements either, so I used to copy-paste code to and from my "offline" editor and version control (Coda) constantly. Not very elegant.

I finally found a simple solution to use my external editor, without installing any plug-ins or changing anything to the platform and without having to copy code all the time. If you're still struggling with this, have a look at my article about an external editor tweak for CMS MS at http://bit.ly/94XnPL - maybe this works for you.

Best regards,

Jasper

[Jeff]

You should take a look at TemplateExternalizer http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/projects/externalizer

[Jaro]

Thanks, yes I've seen this.