Feature Requests?

Hey guys! We've been hard at work improving the site for you. We hope you like the tweaks to the layout, forums, and improved browser compatibility.

We've got tons of ideas on how to improve the site, but we need your help on prioritization. Let us know what you really wish OHH could do for you. Also, if there are any parts of the site that you just can't stand, let us know about that, too! Sometimes we just get used to the way things are, so it's sometimes a little hard to see what we need to improve.

Here's a short list of what we're hoping to add next:

• Project import/export
• Git support
• Forums for individual projects

Which features are you most excited about? Tell us, and we'll work on those first!

I recently started a little shop on tindie.com

I really like the fact that you can use text formatting to give the descriptions a nicer look. It's pretty similar to wikipedia or github.

* for list items

# for a large headline #

## for a smaller headline ##

etc.

That would be nice to have too.

We already support text formatting for a number of fields. Project descriptions, forums posts, and step descriptions all support odered lists, unordered lists, bold, and italic.

Are you asking for us to add headers, too? Or maybe your browser just isn't showing you the formatting options on those text fields? (We use standard html tags for formatting as opposed to Markdown like GitHub does. Markdown is fragmented at the moment and is still on it's way to being standardized: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of-markdown.html)

Some text formatting examples:

Bold Text

Italic Text

Bold and Italic Text

1. Ordered List One
2. Ordered List Two
3. Ordered List Three

• Unordered List
• Another Item
• Last Item

Hmm. I can see the 'B' and 'I' and list icons in the editor just fine.

I just find it more convenient to "just type" and concentrate on the content - not having to use the mouse to do the formatting. I don't need WYSIWYG at that stage. Maybe I'm just odd ;-)

Also I don't think OHH would need a full blown version of markdown, just a minimal set:

A couple of predefined font sizes, list items and external links. That should be all. I think that could easily be handled by a script that does a simple regex-based text-replacement when the actual web-page is generated.

Ahh, ok. I can see where you're coming from! You can hit the HTML button, too, type the html markup if that suits you, but I know that can be a little awkward sometimes.

The actual parsing of Markdown is no problem! There are libraries all over the place that do it for you. I'll just have to think a little on how I can differentiate between a field that has been Markdown'd vs one that has been formatted with html since some of the text fields in the database are already formatted using html.

Well...

I don't know if there exists something like an "is_html()" or "contains_html()" function in any programming language. Assuming there is something like that available, you could do something like this:

* Check user-created content for any form of html code. If you find it, leave it alone altogether.

* If the content can be sonsidered as "plain text", which would include markdown, pass it to the markdown library that generates the html file sent to the browser.

Existing content should be unaffected.

If the user wants to use markdown, he has to remove any form of html from his content. Otherwise using markdown won't become effective.

Maybe it would be easier to add a checkbox to enable markdown. That way the system would also know to use a different editor that doesn't provice HTML stuff. There might be a hint that using html and markdown at the same time would probably not work.

Anyhow, the user should be the one to decide if and when to convert his content. Less work for you. Passing existing content through a script to convert from html to markdown is dangerous. If things go sour, you would have to take the heat. If markdown looks better and is easier to create, people would use that and probably 'upgrade' their existing content.

Probably sounds easier than it is ;-)

Yeah, I initially thought of implementing it exactly as you outlined, but there's a problem. The WYSIWYG editor automatically inserts <p> and <br/> tags into everything. If I did a regex search for html tags, I'd always find them.

I think I may just be able to run everything through a markdown interpreter whether it has html formatting or not if I massage the data just right. I'm gonna check into this.

Markdown is now supported, but it's supported in an odd way. In order to use it, you have to put "%m*d%" into your text without the *. This had to be done because the html that was automatically added by the WYSIWYG editor was throwing off the markdown interpreter. The only way to reliably convert the markdown into HTML was to use a flag to signal that the text was definitely formatted using markdown.

I will check it out later today.