Linking in rich text editors

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:04:14 GMT

Jon Udell <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/08/17/unexamined-software-idioms-1-linking-in-rich-text-editors/">recently blogged</a> about how the user interface for creating links in rich text editor hasn't changed in years:

The idiom goes like this:

1. Select the text to which you want to attach your link.
2. Click the Link button.
3. Type (or paste) the URL.

I’ve watched novices struggle with this for years, and it’s no wonder that they do.

We've spent a number of cycles making the rich text editor linking process easier in Clearspace. In case you've never explored the little link button in the editor, clicking on it pops up a window that looks like this:

The pop up window defaults to showing you a search interface: do a quick search and you can link to anything in Clearspace. Conveniently there are two other options: the history option:

which shows a list of your most recently viewed blog posts, forum threads and wiki documents and second: the web address option:

where you can type in or paste a URL and then a link title. We've gone through a number of rounds of design on this pop up window and I'm sure there's still room for improvement (there is no perfect design). We'd love to hear your feedback though: what do you like about linking in the editor? Which of the three tabs do you find you use the most? Did you even know it was there? And for any developers out there, has anyone tried to or wanted to customize the editor? If so, what did you did do to it?

Blog Posts From Jive Developer Blog Tagged With unexamined-software-idioms

Linking in rich text editors