volto-slate

Watch a 5 minutes "elevator pitch" for volto-slate

An alternative text editor for Volto, capable of completely replacing the default richtext editor while offering enhanced functionality and behavior. We believe that, in order to succeed, Volto's richtext form editor (the Volto Composite Page editor) needs strong integration between the rich text capabilities and the rest of the Volto blocks. Some examples of the kind of strong integration we have in mind:

Pasting complex documents inside a volto-slate text block will create multiple Volto blocks: images will be converted to Volto Image blocks, tables will be converted to Volto Table blocks, etc.
The text block accepts drag&drop images and it will upload them as Volto Image blocks.
volto-slate has a Table button with the familiar size input, but it create a Table block

While this addon is still in an early alpha stage, we've solved most of the big issues, the API starts to stabilize and we've already started several addons based on it: https://github.com/eea/volto-slate-metadata-mentions/ and https://github.com/eea/volto-slate-zotero

Why

Some of the main reasons that drove us to create volto-slate instead of enhancing Volto's draftjs implementation:

Volto's draftjs implementation depends on draft-js-plugins, a third-party project that introduces its own set of bugs and maintanance issues
Slate has a modern, developer-friendly api that makes developing plugins something easy to do. Getting the editor in a plugin is as easy as const editor = useSlate(), overriding core functionality is something that's built in as pluggable, directly in Slate.
Volto's draft based implementation depends on Redraft for its final output, which comes with its own bugs and issues. While it is nice to have view-mode components, this is something that volto-slate implements just as well.
Because Slate's internal storage uses a tree modeled on the DOM pattern, its final rendered output is very clean. Note: The Slate editor value is a JSON object, similar to the Draftjs based implementation.

Upgrades

Upgrade to 4.x.x

Namespace the plugins #156:
- Make sure you upgrade your slate plugins to use the new slate namespaced plugin ids. See for example volto-slate-footnote #23
asDefault profile makes the volto-slate as the default Editor for blocks and richtext.
- If you're not ready for this, yet, switch to volto-slate:asDefaultBlock

Upgrade to 3.x.x

Removed all deprecated, already in Volto Core, futurevolto components:
- SidebarPopup
- ObjectWidget
- ObjectBrowserWidget
- helpers/Blocks
Table inline button and copy&paste support is not installed by default anymore. You'll need to explicitly import the tableButton profile like:
- volto:asDefault,tableButton
- volto-slate:minimalDefault,simpleLink,tableButton

Available profiles.

volto-slate provides several optional configuration:

asDefault - makes the volto-slate as the default Editor for blocks and richtext
asDefaultBlock - makes volto-slate the default Editor for blocks
asDefaultRichText - makes volto-slate the default Editor for richtext widget
minimalDefault, same as the above, but uses a set of toolbar buttons similar to Volto
simpleLink reuses Volto's link plugin and makes for a better replacement of Volto's rich text editor.
tableButton adds table button to Slate toolbar in order to easily insert Table block after.

Features

1. Hovering (floating) toolbar that shows up on selection

2. Optional expanded (fixed) toolbar

3. Working with links (internal, external, email)

4. Removing links

5. Editing links

6. Block-quotes

7. Split paragraph block in two with `Enter` key and join them back with `Backspace` key

8. Breaking and joining list items

9. Breaking (with expanded selection) and joining list items

10. Inserting a new list item at the end

11. Two `Enter` key presses in the last empty list item creates a new list

12. Using `Up` and `Down` keys to go through the blocks in both directions

13. Changing indent level of list items using `Tab` and `Shift-Tab` keys

14. Splitting a list block with `Enter` into two list blocks

15. Support for markdown bulleted lists with `*`, `-` and `+`

16. Support for markdown numbered lists with `1.` - `9.`

17. `Backspace` with cursor on first position inside a list with just one item converts the list to a paragraph

18. Creating a new text block with `Enter` at the end of a text block and removing it with `Backspace`

19. Switching the list type (numbered list to/from bulleted list)

Getting started

Try volto-slate with Docker

Get the latest Docker images

docker pull plone
docker pull plone/volto

Start Plone backend

docker run -d --name plone -p 8080:8080 -e SITE=Plone -e PROFILES="profile-plone.restapi:blocks" plone

Start Volto frontend

docker run -it --rm -p 3000:3000 --link plone -e ADDONS="volto-slate:asDefault" plone/volto

Go to http://localhost:3000
Login with admin:admin
Create a new Page and add a new Text block.

Add volto-slate to your Volto project

Make sure you have a Plone backend up-and-running at http://localhost:8080/Plone
Start Volto frontend

If you already have a Volto project, just update package.json:

"addons": [
    "volto-slate:asDefault"
],

"dependencies": {
    "volto-slate": "*"
}

If not, create one:

npm install -g yo @plone/generator-volto
yo @plone/volto my-volto-project --addon volto-slate:asDefault
cd my-volto-project

Install new add-ons and restart Volto:
```
yarn install
yarn start
```

Go to http://localhost:3000
Happy editing!

Plugins

To write a new plugin, please refer plugins

Cypress

We aim to achieve a good coverage for cypress. Please refer to commands listed here to ease the process of writing new tests.

Release

Automatic release using Jenkins

The automatic release is started by creating a Pull Request from develop to master. The pull request status checks correlated to the branch and PR Jenkins jobs need to be processed successfully. 1 review from a github user with rights is mandatory.
It runs on every commit on master branch, which is protected from direct commits, only allowing pull request merge commits.
The automatic release is done by Jenkins. The status of the release job can be seen both in the Readme.md badges and the green check/red cross/yellow circle near the last commit information. If you click on the icon, you will have the list of checks that were run. The continuous-integration/jenkins/branch link goes to the Jenkins job execution webpage.
Automated release scripts are located in the eeacms/gitflow docker image, specifically js-release.sh script. It uses the release-it tool.
As long as a PR request is open from develop to master, the PR Jenkins job will automatically re-create the CHANGELOG.md and package.json files to be production-ready.
The version format must be MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. By default, next release is set to next minor version (with patch 0).
You can manually change the version in package.json. The new version must not be already present in the tags/releases of the repository, otherwise it will be automatically increased by the script. Any changes to the version will trigger a CHANGELOG.md re-generation.
Automated commits and commits with [JENKINS] or [YARN] in the commit log are excluded from CHANGELOG.md file.

Manual release from the develop branch ( beta release )

Installation and configuration of release-it

You need to first install the release-it client.

npm install -g release-it

Release-it uses the configuration written in the .release-it.json file located in the root of the repository.

Release-it is a tool that automates 4 important steps in the release process:

Version increase in package.json ( increased from the current version in package.json)
CHANGELOG.md automatic generation from commit messages ( grouped by releases )
GitHub release on the commit with the changelog and package.json modification on the develop branch
NPM release ( by default it's disabled, but can be enabled in the configuration file )

To configure the authentification, you need to export GITHUB_TOKEN for GitHub

export GITHUB_TOKEN=XXX-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

To configure npm, you can use the npm login command or use a configuration file with a TOKEN :

echo "//registry.npmjs.org/:_authToken=YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY" > .npmrc

Using release-it tool

There are 3 yarn scripts that can be run to do the release

yarn release-beta

Automatically calculates and presents 3 beta versions - patch, minor and major for you to choose ( or Other for manual input).

? Select increment (next version):
❯ prepatch (0.1.1-beta.0)
  preminor (0.2.0-beta.0)
  premajor (1.0.0-beta.0)
  Other, please specify...

yarn release-major-beta

Same as yarn release-beta, but with premajor version pre-selected.

yarn release

Generic command, does not automatically add the beta to version, but you can still manually write it if you choose Other.

Important notes

Do not use release-it tool on master branch, the commit on CHANGELOG.md file and the version increase in the package.json file can't be done without a PULL REQUEST.

Do not keep Pull Requests from develop to master branches open when you are doing beta releases from the develop branch. As long as a PR to master is open, an automatic script will run on every commit and will update both the version and the changelog to a production-ready state - ( MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH mandatory format for version).

How to contribute

See DEVELOP.md.

Credit

A lot of inspiration from the great Slate Plugins repository, especially the autoformat handlers.

Copyright and license

See LICENSE.md for details.

Funding

European Environment Agency (EU)

eea/volto-slate