Hi! I would like to provide the best writing experience possible for users of the forum I plan to set up with bbpress. Gutenberg is a good example–a clean “elegant” interface, options to go full screen (so the only thing user sees is where they will write), options to style with a button click, and option to easily insert code snippets with a button click. Its comparable to using good writing software, and no need for non-technical users to know what “UL”, “OL”, “Li” etc mean.

I have been looking through some plugins for styling bbpress, but I have not seen them discuss this aspect. Are there options available to make the bbpress text editor “elegant” in a way that is comparable to Gutenberg or the writing experience on a spot like medium.com?

[@netweb Keymaster 6 years, 9 months ago]

Thanks @w3215, I’d love to see this sort of thing myself, or at least explore the idea and see how well a fit it fits a forum workflow….

I’ve not yet myself explored the possibilities of what we could do with bbPress and Gutenberg… I have a few ideas that I want to experiment with in the next month or so though…

I’d love to see and hear some more thoughts on these types of ideas the bbPress community has

[@w3215 Participant 6 years, 9 months ago]

Thanks. Something that truly gave a clean interface (like gutenberg or medium.com as mentioned) would be ideal. But if there are not currently options for that for the bbpress text editor, are there options to improve the editor from the default?

For example, to make it comparable to the text editor for ‘Discourse’ forum sites? (like https://discuss.reactjs.org/ or https://discuss.atom.io/).

I have heard there may be a way to turn on the tinyMCE toolbar in bbpress, which is an improvement.

However, I’m new to wordpress, but that seems to normally go along with a text editor that gives the writer two less than ideal options: a (i) “visual” option with the tinyMCE (the problem being it strips away a lot of formatting–for example removing tabs if you paste code in) or (ii) the basic “text” option, which is not great for a general audience bc it requires the writer deal with stuff like tags and html-jargon. Its also confusing to give users two different options that seem to do the same thing but in slightly different ways.

So, if a Gutenberg-like experience is too much to ask right now, is there anything around that can give users the straightforward toolbar experience of the “Discourse” text editor?

[@lflier Participant 5 years, 8 months ago]

Late to the party, but instructions for enabling the TinyMCE editor are here. Instructions for styling the content inside the editor are here. TinyMCE is not Gutenberg. But it’s simple and reasonably user-friendly.