Please TRU Write With Me, I’m All Shiny And New

What’s wrong around here? It’s been maybe a month since I’ve blogged about SPLOTs. Some might speculate it’s the cold here, but quite the opposite, the hands have been very warm, working deep in the code.

There were some wild sparks when I cracked an issue in SPLOTs like TRU Writer, TRU Collector, and SPLOTbox that offer the front end rich text editor to compose stuff. Until now, the editor did not automatically embed media from sites like YouTube, vimeo, twitter, SoundCloud from a plain URL — the user had to trust it would happen.

With a bit of rummaging around StackExchange, it was a matter of enqueuing on more script on the page this was loaded on. For TRU Writer, in the part of the code where I add my extra scripts, we do one more if it’s the page with the writing form:

Woah, easy. And even better, one more option on the set up for the rich text editor, makes it so it supports drag and dropping media files to upload and insert them:

Another feature was changing one css class in the template page, so the form is wider, giving more room to work in. But while fiddling there, I decided that some sites may want the wide column layout for content, so this is now a Customizer feature.

There are a batch of other smaller fixes, layout cleanups. I created a few more options for the usage rights menu, and improved the display of the creative commons license (if used as a feature).

You can see (and try these out yourself) in the demo site http://splot.ca/writer

I was also motivated to get this in the mix for a fabulous new site created as a home for #femedtech.

I was pinged by Lorna Campbell and Frances Bell a few weeks ago when they were setting up, and excited to see them not only make the SPLOT front and center, but to garner already a lot of guest writing.

Because I have access, I gave their site a beta test with the new version, Frances jumped right in.

The newest version is ready for you at https://github.com/cogdog/truwriter. And I am working with Reclaim Hosting to push out an update for any sites that made a site from their one click cpanel installer.

If not, you will either have to roll up the sleeves and do the old school manual upload via sftp. Or there is the Easy Theme and Plugin Upgrades plugin that lets you upload a ZIP of the theme and have it update (WordPress still refuses to do this, you can install this way, but not update, pfffft). I wrote up some more details on SPLOT updates a few posts ago.

I’ve got updates coming with the same features soon on TRU Collector, and SPLOTbox — these need to be rigged up with a new approach to a preview/update/publish cycle.

It’s kind of shiny, at least to me.

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