Diary Of An ADI

Or subtitled: DO NOT USE FOLIOPRESS WYSIWYG PLUG-IN AS YOUR WORDPRESS TEXT EDITOR. EVER.

For any non-UK readers, when you “rub someone up the wrong way” what you are doing is going against the grain, aggravating them, creating unnecessary conflict, and so on. I think the phrase is derived from the old advice about rubbing a cat’s fur the wrong way (wear leather gauntlets if you do). Everyone does it to everyone else at one time or another, but every so often you encounter someone who just does it every time.

It might be a certain popstar with a whiney voice, or carefully cultivated persona intended to appeal to anarchic youths. Or it might be someone you casually meet (ADI meetings are good places to find them) who has a fixed opinion on something and who just won’t shut up about it. The worst ones, though, are those you are stuck with. I remember one from my time in the rat race – he was a manager to whom I reported for a mercifully short time – who could start an argument in an empty room. Even when he agreed with something, he had to disagree to show how clever and thoughtful he was. But you get the idea.

A while back I mentioned that I’d found a WordPress plug-in, Foliopress WYSIWYG, which was much better than the default text editor. At the time, that was true. However, I first encountered a genuine problem with it in July this year, after I discovered that it was screwing up HTML tags when formatting text (it was nesting them incorrectly). I posted my findings on their forum and asked if it was by design, or had I found a bug. The author replied:

You shouldn’t be putting so many elements on a single piece of text in the first place…

…Not only that but using underlining on the web is extremely bad practice as underlining is assigned to hyperlinks.

We do our best to provide the best possible WYSIWYG editing environment but if you bang your head against the wall hard enough, you are sure to draw blood and/or fade into unconsciousness. No helmet will protect you.

Now, if I want to underline something for emphasis – like this – then I will. My “so many elements” amounted to just two: <span> and <ul>. The problem was that you had to use formatting buttons in a very specific order otherwise the text editor nested them incorrectly, and this made subsequent editing a major headache if you inadvertently “split” the tags, and then inserted some more. I told him that I was reporting a find, not asking for a lesson, to which he replied:

You have no idea how many people chase us around on our plugins and contribute nothing.

It will be difficult to resolve the nesting tags issues as they are part of the core FCKeditor (they might be better in CKeditor and we are preparing the move to CKedtitor now, but probably not)…

Sorry for the misunderstanding. Your contribution is much appreciated. Please report any other issues you find and we’ll do our best to resolve them. This one is out of our power.

Now, he could have told me that right away. But he didn’t. He chose to rub me up the wrong way by trying to be superior about it.

A few weeks later the plug-in was updated, and it contained a great new feature making adding links easier. I started using it a lot… only for it to stop working completely following a further update. Again, I asked if I had missed something or done something wrong on their forums, The reply:

Check the release notes please.

OK. I’m already biting my lip here. I replied:

I’m really sorry to be a pain (and a dumb***), but where ARE the release notes. They’re not in the ZIP file if I download the latest version. And the link you gave me just points to all the comments from previous months and years.

I can’t find a reference in these comments on this page to the change that occurred this week.

And when I Google “foliopress release notes”, lo! and behold I find an article on this site that tells me about the very new features which appear to have gone missing having been introduced as exciting new features!

Another author answered this time and provided the correct links to the release notes (though I should point out that it is usual practice to include them in the download package). However, the original guy comes back with:

We do NOT recommend using IE9 with Foliopress WYSIWYG at this point. There are serious enough issues that we’ve removed support for the browser until FCKeditor and CKeditor work properly in Microsoft’s browser.

Until that point, we cannot troubleshoot any issues with IE9.

I’m biting my lip really hard now. My preferred browser is Internet Explorer – through a conscious choice. But what they then did was disable Foliopress WYSIWYG so it wouldn’t run on IE at all (even though it was working to a usable degree before). Not just the new features, but the entire plug-in was disabled, and if I remember there was some nerdy comment about Microsoft if you tried to launch it from IE. This would be like buying a new car, then finding out that while you were asleep the manufacturer had come round and put wheel clamps on all four wheels, and thrown eggs at your front door. Your only option was to rush out and get another car!

I switched to the Chrome browser for editing my blog posts and all was well. Until this week.

WordPress was updated to v3.3. I did the upgrade and everything was fine – until I tried to add a link to some text. I was faced with a stream of PHP errors and warnings. I waited a couple of days, because I assumed that the problem was due to the plug-in authors not having caught up with WordPress yet. So after the expected Foliopress update a day or so later, I again tried to link some text. Same problem.

I contacted the authors and provided a copy of the errors. The reply (guess who from):

We have a very active forum these days: [link]

Please contribute your findings there.

Thanks!

I’m biting my lip already! So, I copied the text from his reply email and made a post in the forum. His reply on the forum:

Your post above is not very nicely formatted and very difficult to read. Please make an effort not to vandalise our forums.

I’m seeing red now. His email client has added line breaks with “>” at the start of each new line, and I’d pasted this into the forum message rather than type the whole lot out again. I didn’t even give it a second thought. It’s no big deal (except to a prat). I replied:

I copied it and pasted it from the email which you replied to but didn’t answer [name].

As I had typed it all out once, I didn’t want to do it again. I’m more concerned with getting the product… working than reformatting text which gets mangled by your contact form.

Now look, if we could please stay on the very specific topic of Foliopress not working after a WP update, and not my typing or grammar, I would be VERY grateful.

His reply:

Perhaps you should be a little less hot on the trigger with WordPress updates.

We will have a fix by January.

If you would like better service, please be more polite and please do not deface our forums. Text cleaning is not difficult.

PS. Your attitude is not appropriate. The commercial price of an editor like the one we provide would be what you donated on a per site basis.

The guy simply cannot get it into his thick skull that I was reporting a bug – nothing more. But it was like trying to get a baby to eat mush from a spoon when it doesn’t want to!

But anyway, we now have confirmation – which could have been given in that first email asking me to put it on the forum instead – that Foliopress doesn’t work with WordPress 3.3. And it won’t work until January at the earliest. Or, in other words, as well as not working with that “rubbish” Microsoft browser, it now doesn’t work with any other browser either.

We also have the idiotic advice not to upgrade WordPress (even though 3.3 has been in beta since October). Upgrades often include security tweaks and features that users actually want. And it’s also worth reminding certain people that Foliopress depends on WordPress – not the other way round.

I pointed all this out to Mr Annoying. His considered response was to delete the entire topic. I’d guess this is partly in an effort to conceal the problem from those who need to know about it – the users. After all, the fact that it doesn’t work is now not known to anyone happening by the plug-ins download library.

Foliopress is now off my system, and it will never go back. My advice to anyone looking for an editor – and this is based solely on my own overall experiences – is not to go anywhere near this plug-in. It is flaky, which might not have been such a problem if it hadn’t been for the attitude of one of its authors.