[Erlend]

So I’m wondering, how will the bbPress plugin deal with front-end editing? It’s certainly not uncommon that you need to go back and edit your post, and when you do that you’d rather not be sucked into the WP admin panel just for a quick edit. However, from the little I’ve experienced and read about plugins taking advantage of custom post types in WordPress, front-end editing is no simple task.

Example one: BuddyPress Wiki Component

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-wiki/

In order to achieve front-end editing of wiki pages (custom post type), it bundles its own TinyMCE script. This also allows it to extend TinyMCE with wiki-specific features.

Example two: Justin Tadlock’s Custom Post Type based Forum

http://justintadlock.com/archives/2010/07/16/a-wordpress-forum-plugin-using-custom-post-types

At the time being, front-end editing is not possible with his forum, and according to his roadmap the forum will use existing inline-edit plugins available (I believe Scribu’s editor was mentioned somewhere).

—

I wouldn’t imagine the official bbPress plugin would resort to yet another plugin for such a basic functionality, so what’s the plan? What I’d love to see is rich front-end editing based on the native WP editor, meaning if I have plugins that extend the native editor, they also extend the front-end editor (provided its within the scope of the editor-extending plugin and the admin enables it).

Best case scenario, this involves modifying the WordPress core so that plugins like the two mentioned above will also have an easier time tapping into native WordPress for front-end edits.

[Matt Mullenweg]

Check out how P2 does front-end editor, it’s even slicker than bbPress. Actually check out a bunch of the features of P2 like the real-time post updating, etc.

[Ryan Hellyer]

Justin Tadlock’s plugin does allow front-end editing. It just forces you to use the WordPress admin panel if you don’t have JS running. Having said that, I’d much rather see that improved in the future so that front-end editing was possible without JS on. I assume Justin is working on that though.

[Erlend]

@Ryan: I had JS enabled but.., aha, I never noticed the double-click edit upon mouse hover before. Neat

Now, the thing I encountered in both the P2 theme and Justin’s forum plugin is: Neither (seems to be able to-) take advantage of WordPress’ own in-built rich text editor.

I probably did not make this clear enough in my first post. My main point sort of ended up in the second to last paragraph:

What I’d love to see is rich front-end editing based on the native WP editor

What I’m inquiring about is:

How to achieve front-end editing with WordPress’ native rich editor?

The main question is of course ‘how will bbPress go about doing this?’, but clearly this method is still unbeknown to many plugin authors who could greatly benefit from it.

(Disclaimer: My project relies on the bp-wiki plugin, and I am indeed curious as to the possibility of a a more conventional approach to rich front end edits in the future.)

One ‘almost’ example I found is this one:

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-excerpt/

It grabs the native editor and displays it somewhere new. However I suspect it can only do so because it’s still within the confines of the admin backend. Posting and editing content from front-end can clearly be achieved, but apparently with severe limitations. It’s getting functions that are normally limited to the backend (tinymce editor, file upload, etc) to the front-end that is awkward.

Speaking of which, feasibility image/file uploads would make for an excellent follow-up question, but maybe you’d rather have me start a new thread for it?

[Gautam Gupta]

@Erlend

Adding front-end posting with TinyMCE isn’t a huge task. Regarding image uploads, P2 theme already has that functionality.

[Erlend]

@Gautam

By that you mean front-end posting with the native WP editor, right? Not an included, new editor, the way bp-wiki or scribu’s editor currently does it?

Because when I’ve applied a plugin to extend the WP editor, that should apply to the front-end editing as well.

Thanks for the hint about image uploads with P2, I hadn’t noticed the feature. I’ll probably have to do a fresh test install though, because it’s buggy on my current one. Will report back my experiences later.

[Gautam Gupta]

@Erland

We can load the same scripts, hooks etc. and it would come up. I haven’t checked that in detail, but it should be possible.

[Matt Mullenweg]

The challenge comes from the security model: WP hides a lot of things unless you’re on the backend.

[Erlend]

The challenge comes from the security model: WP hides a lot of things unless you’re on the backend.

Right on the money. That’s the root of my curiosity exactly.

So I see three possible options:

– With code-wizardry, you achieve what no other plugin author seems to have accomplished until now (bypassing the security model, without compromising WP security of course).

– Altering the way WP ‘guards’ its rich text editor

– Making a separate editor for the forumplugin

Or am I missing something?

It’s not like I really expect a finite answer while bbPress plugin is still in the early design stages, but it looks like this feature presents a proper challenge for the developers, hence my curiosity is peaked.

Maybe a good topic for a weekly meeting a bit further down the road?

[Matt Mullenweg]

The security issues have nothing to do with TinyMCE, the editor, I’ve just avoided included that in something like P2 or QuickPress because it’s huge, and slow. It’s a lot of overhead for most forums which are largely text.