Hi everyone,
For the past few years BLF has been using an advanced post editor to format posts with bold text, tables, alignment, etc. This advanced editor will continue to be available for this who prefer it.
However, many users experience issues with the advanced post editor.
- Under certain circumstances it loses parts of the post
- It is rather large and slow to load.
- It is overly complex for simple posts.
- It produces weird formatting when pasting in text from other sources.
- It is incompatible with some desktop browsers.
- It is incompatible with many mobile browsers for Android and Apple products.
For these reasons, BLF is now offering an optional new post editor for those who prefer it.
* Description for people who don’t care: The new editor is simple, fast, and compatible with all browsers, but it has less options and doesn’t show the formatting until you submit the post.
* Description for geeks: The new post editor is based on the Textile markup language. This is my favorite method of editing content, which is why I chose to use it here on BLF. 
Instead of showing the final format while editing the post, Textile uses simple tags to mark text for later formatting. Textile tags are much more simple and intuitive than HTML, and they don’t clutter up the post with a lot of
<confusing>tags</confusing>
If you prefer, you can directly type the tags yourself. Or, you can use the tag buttons that I created especially for Textile on BLF. Upon submitting the post, a converter will automatically render your Textile markup in proper HTML.
How to switch between the new and old post editor
To switch editors for a single post: Expand the ▸Input Format tab below the post editor, and select “Simple Post Editor” for the new one, or “Advanced Post Editor” for the old one.
To set your default post editor: Go to your user account settings, click the “Edit” tab, and toward the bottom you will see options for “Preferred input formats”.
Known issues
- Issue: There is currently no way to make the “Simple Post Editor” buttons disappear when the “Advanced Post Editor” is in use.
- Solution: Don’t click on the “Simple Post Editor” buttons when using the “Advanced Post Editor”.
- Issue: It is not possible to switch a post from one input format to another.
- Workaround: If you create a post with the “Simple Post Editor” and later decide you want to continue editing it with the “Advanced Post Editor”, you can:
- Save your post or view the saved post you want to change.
- Select and copy the formatted text.
- Click “Edit” on the post.
- Switch the input format to “Advanced Post Editor”.
- Paste in the formatted text and continue editing it.
- Workaround: If you create a post with the “Simple Post Editor” and later decide you want to continue editing it with the “Advanced Post Editor”, you can:
- Issue: Some common formatting buttons might be missing on the new “Simple Post Editor”.
- Solution: Please let me know, and I’ll see if I can add the button.
For now, I am going to set the default input format to the new “Simple Post Editor” to force everyone to try it. Please use it for a few days and see if you like it. If not, you can always switch back to the old editor by default by following the above instructions.
I hope this will resolve a lot of issues for our users. Thanks for being a part of BLF! Have fun.
