Newbie documentation

[ianb@…]

* The package files should link to the newbie documentation somehow. README.txt or something. No documentation or pointers to documentation are included.

* The newbie guide should suggest opening tickets (under a separate component). I can't track what is and isn't resolved in the message board, so I don't know if there's open problems. And deep link to the report of open newbie-doc bugs.

* This example needs a semicolon:

_editor_url = "/xinha/" // (preferably absolute) URL (including trailing slash) where Xinha is installed

* It would be nice to suggest how to customize Xinha when including the my_config.js. I think you'd do this by resetting variables like xinha_editors in inline Javascript, after you include the config.

* In the example config window.onload clobbers any other onload callbacks.

* There's no links to further documentation, like wiki:Documentation or wiki:Documentation/Customise -- well, not much documentation there yet. But still, someplace to go would be good.

[mokhet]

I think the newbie guide is not very easy to understand for a newbie. There is too much info at once to really understand what is really needed. As a result, I think most people doesnt understand really what they are doing and why they are doing it. The usage of plugin is a bonus for a newbie imo, same for the consideration about the config in a separate file. From my side of view (not a js expert), the NewbieGuide is still too advanced to let people use Xinha easily without a headach.

I have created 2 wiki pages from "tutorials" i was making on my own. Think we should add a link to it somewhere in the guide. Of course it is far from being perfect, but at least now it's on wiki and can be updated.

Basic usage Multiple editors

For the window.onload issue, i dunno if it's good or very bad but i usually do something like this

var old_on_load = window.onload;
window.onload = function() {
 if (typeof old_on_load == "function") old_on_load();
 xinha_init();
}

[gogo]

Actually we should now use HTMLArea.addDom0Event(window, 'load', xinha_init);

[ianb@…]

After having used Xinha some, I think the whole editor initialization desperately needs to be improved. The reason people choose TinyMCE is because it is easy to setup. That's all I really hear -- which perhaps points to a relatively low level of analysis going into decisions, but it still is what it is. Packaging all those initialization routines into something simpler is not particularly hard, and could be done in a separate file so that it doesn't really effect any existing setups. Ideally I'd like:

<textarea type="xinha">...quoted html...</textarea>

As the simplest setup (with no customization). Other customization would ideally be done with functions referenced, perhaps like:

<textarea type="xinha" xinha-profile="complex">...</textarea>

This would call something like complex(xinha_config) before instantiating the editor, which itself could do whatever it wanted to the config. Then customization can be encapsulated into fairly simple config-modifying functions, and traded around and packaged with Xinha without having to do lots of setup in individual forms.