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You are here: TWiki> Support Web>WYSIWYGEditorBreaksSystemTopics (02 Jul 2008, KennethLavrsen)
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Question

I wanted to document my installation experience and include all the issues I ran into while installing a test TWiki so that when I install the live/actual TWiki site that my company will be using I'll have good reference material for some of the stickier issues I ran into. For no particular reason, I decided to record my installation notes in my personal topic (the one that is automatically created when you register). While adding this content to my topic, I used the integrated Kupu WYSIWYG plugin editor. Everything seemed to work fine until several hours later when I realized that I hadn't received a single e-mail notification of any changes to the wiki project (for testing purposes I had it configured to check each minute).

Environment

TWiki version: TWikiRelease04Sep2004
TWiki plugins: DefaultPlugin, EmptyPlugin, InterwikiPlugin
Server OS: MS Windows XP Professional
Web server: Apache
Perl version: 5.8.7-5 (Cygwin)
Client OS: MS Windows XP Professional
Web Browser: MS Internet Explorer 6.0
Categories: Fatal error, Plugins

-- JasonVensel - 01 Feb 2006

Answer

ALERT! If you answer a question - or have a question you asked answered by someone - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status is in a drop-down list below the edit box.

After spending a fair amount of time trying to determine what had changed, I discovered that when you edit a topic using the WYSIWYG editor, the editor inserts special formatting codes at the very top/beginning of that topic. You can verify this by opening a topic that has been edited with the WYSIWYG editor with the standard markup language "Edit" link. Here's a sample of the first few lines of a topic that was edited using the WYSIWYG editor, saved, and then opened using the "Edit" editor: 

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><HEAD><LINK media=all

Explanation: E-mail notification works (at least as I understand it to) by "grabbing" the e-mail address from the top of the user's personal page (the page that is created in the Main web when you register). Apparently, and (now that I've figured it out) not surprisingly, when you edit a personal page with the WYSIWYG editor and those additional formatting codes are inserted at the top, it interferes with the ability of the e-mail notification script to "grab" your e-mail address.

Solution: I was able to resolve this issue by:

  1. editing my personal page (Main.FirstLast) with the standard markup language "Edit" link;
  2. deleting all content from that page;
  3. pasting in the raw text from another user's personal page so I had the standard personal page format (I'm not sure if simply copying it from the "view" would be adequate; you'll want to copy the raw text from the markup language "Edit" view); and
  4. replacing all user-specific info in my topic (entered my name, my e-mail address, etc.).
  5. After doing this, change notification by e-mail began working again.

Note: Change notification doesn't care whether you edit a topic using the standard markup language "Edit" link or the integrated Kupu WYSIWYG plugin - it'll report any changes made using either. I mention this only because I initially wondered if changes made using the WYSIWYG editor weren't reported/counted.

Important: I expect there are other "system" topics (by "system," I mean those such as the WebNotify topics, WebPreferences topics, TWikiPreferences topic, etc.) that are used by the TWiki application that you would NOT want to edit using the WYSIWYG editor. Thus, TWiki administrators may wish to configure "edit" rights for those topics to prevent non-admin users from breaking the wiki through use of the WYSIWYG editor.

-- JasonVensel - 01 Feb 2006

Your personal page is definitely a topic that you don't want to wysiwyg! And it is one that people will likely try to edit first. At least I did. After wysiwyg editing my Main.FirstLast page, whenever I went to edit any page, the textarea was blank! I will try to duplicate this problem and give more details, but as this was at the end of a long update to dakar, I shut off wysiwyg and used rcs -o to back out my changes so that I could take the site live. (I was afraid that somehow turning on wysiwyg had trashed my update, and I was going to have to back it out, so I wasn't focusing on saving the evidence...) frown

-- DougClaar - 11 Apr 2006

Note for all those out there keeping score. I just ran into this problem today -- HowToFixLostIcons -- in a fairly fresh install of TWiki 4.2 This is still a problem and be careful. Edit your system preferences in RawText? to be sure. To be specific -- a lot of things had "%20"s added here and there, and this totally horked the ATTACHURL path somehow

-- RedByer - 14 May 2008

The WYSIWYG editor in 4.2 also breaks verbatim text blocks. I have some example code for shell script in a verbatim block in a topic and if I edit the topic with the WYSIWYG editor then the formatting gets borked. Is there a way to have the WYSIWYG editor not touch text in verbatim or code (code beautifier plugin) blocks?

-- GordonTerrell - 01 Jul 2008

Try this: on either TWikiPreferences? or any WebPreferences, 

   * Set WYSIWYG_EXCLUDE = html,variables,calls,pre,comments
. This causes the WYSIWYG editor to work on all topics except those containing HTML or TWiki Variables.

-- DavidWolfe - 01 Jul 2008

Or update the WysiwygPlugin and TinyMCEPlugin? . This trailing space on bullets has been fixed.

-- KennethLavrsen - 02 Jul 2008

 
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Topic revision: r7 - 02 Jul 2008 - 15:59:25 - KennethLavrsen
 
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