As an Administrator, I'd like to be able to insert rich text into my pages

[robyurkowski]

And I don't want it to produce a jumble of spaghetti code, either! When I look at the source, it should look like God him- or herself threw up, and He should see that It Was Good!

[robyurkowski]

@GeekOnCoffee @awagener @nicinabox Can you lovely people do some research on this if you have time? Not so much implementation specifics (although I wouldn't say no, we're still a bit early to figure that out), but at least a few proposals as to what we should do?

@nicinabox, I'm particularly interested to hear about compositing our views a la Harmony. Can you explain a few of the particulars? How do I include an image inside a text blurb, for example? How do we ensure that end users won't painfully break things?

[nicinabox]

Love to.

The layout engine doesn't care about the content. It's focused solely on arranging content blocks. Each block is draggable, sortable, and resizable. Some blocks can be nested in other blocks (like images). Each block can be aligned in it's row, or within it's parent block (eg, an image can be left, center, right and content can flow around it).

The code generation would be pretty simple, markup wise. Probably just rows and columns around the blocks. You'd get responsive for free like that. The core of each block is a textarea that gets populated with some generated code. For a wysiwyg or rte editor you'd have an iframe in the mix as well, but it doesn't change anything.

Here's the prototype I built.. Run demo/index.html.

Ease of use is something that I foresee being difficult to get right. The tolerances are tricky. A user should be able to drag blocks around, create rows and columns on the fly, or nest (float) blocks inside other columns.

[nicinabox]

@robyurkowski I'd love to hear what you guys were thinking, too.