Enhance text editor across all areas of the platform

I agree this is much needed! I need to be able to send url links via private message. 

Howdy @CommunityKaila and @Beachball3000 !

The name’s 186, Blastoise186. I’m no inSider myself, but I am a friendly volunteer who helps out here.

My understanding is that there is a plan to try and unify the editor that gets used across the entire platform, but it’s a bit complicated due to differences in how various modules were built. Not least the fact that Private Messages are still running on an older setup than the main Community module for example. It’s going to take a while before all the underlying infrastructure gets upgraded to make this possible however.

What I can also say is that I believe the main Editor that’s used for the Community, Groups and Ideation modules is based on CKEditor 4, which is a pretty common one that’s used in tons of places.  This is the one that inSided regards as the “New Editor” (TinyMCE is one of the other extremely common ones). Meanwhile the “Legacy Editor” is based on Froala Editor and is still currently used primarily for older things like Private Messages for the time being. It’s not as commonly used as CKEditor or TinyMCE and I’ve not encountered it anywhere outside of inSided, but I know that the plan is to slowly migrate away from it over time.

In actual fact, I also happen to know that inSided are looking to upgrade to CKEditor 5 at some point. So I wouldn’t be too surprised if everything either gets upgraded to CKEditor 5 all in one go or gets done slowly but targeting CKEditor 5, rather than upgrading to CKEditor 4 now and then immediately bumping it to CKEditor 5.

The ability to put a URL into a PM is also being considered. I’ll see if I can find any discussions on that one.

Hi @Beachball3000, thank you for submitting this idea.

And thank you very much @Blastoise186 for providing extra context! :)

Yes please to this. Currently, I’m sending a PM to each new member that registers. I have to do this via Control as they haven’t posted anything on the community. As a first impression, it would be good to have a nicely formatted message from me. 🙏