ASP.NET MVC2 Rich Text Editor - telerik

basically, my question is pretty much similar and has been asked numerous times. Which WYSIWYG editor is better now that Telerik has released their MVC editor, would it be wise to purchase the entire suite instead?
Selections:
TinyMCE
CKEditor
Telerik MVC Editor

Disclaimer: As part of the Telerik MVC team (and one of the editor developers), my opinion is quite biased, yet I can shed some light on the differences between the editors.
All of them are open source
Despite Todd's answer, the Telerik MVC editor is open-source, under GPLv2 license (with a commercial license available). Our support is well known, so I guess this is where we stand out (though it is paid). On the other hand, both TinyMCE and CKEditor have huge communities, which may help quickly, too.
Different feature set
This has been the first release of the Telerik MVC editor, while CK and TinyMCE have been around the block for a very long time. We have mixed feelings about this -- while we are missing out on quite a few tools/features, we have invested a lot of time in polishing the existing ones (converting list items to headings, pasting from MS Word). Our bet is on cleaner, more robust code (4k LoC vs 14k LoC in TinyMCE without plug-ins).
It depends on your requirements
After all, with the Telerik suite, you get... well... a suite of components with common code and themes. So if you need the dedicated support and the other components and the limited feature set does not make a difference, Telerik would be a nice choice. If you need a full-scale editor and want to bet on more feature-complete products, TinyMCE and CKEditor are the wiser choice.
I hope this helps and does not contain much happy talk.

Some Background:
While there are some very good third-party components for ASP.NET I tend to stay away from them for the open source alternative. The reason goes back to an issue I has with a chart component a few years ago. It had a bug that the company would not fix in the current version and instead wanted us to purchase an upgrade while not guaranteeing that would fix the problem.
They did offer a demo that we could not use in production (which was the only place we were getting the problem) so the problem continued until the component was replaced.
My Answer
From My experience I would recommend going with the open source alternative. I have used CKEditor and TinyMCE with success in PHP projects. CKEditor can be styled nicely and TinyMCE has tons of documentation from the millions of people who use it daily.
The greatest benefit to open source is being able to change the code to meet your needs or fix a problem specific to your environment.
My last ASP.NET MVC app required all components to be open source for the same reason as mentioned above with the end result being more stable than the previous that included some purchased components.
Hope this helps.

Wordpress uses TinyMCE, so I am very familiar with using it (though getting it to look like wordpress is a little bit of an undertaking).
I have successfully implemented TinyMCE into 2 of my Asp.Net MVC websites with very little effort.
As with any, there is a ramp up time, but TinyMCE has never disappointed me.

We are using CKEditor_3.x in our MVC 2 app.
It works great.
On save:
Just 1 important note, in your CKEditor config file be sure to set:
config.htmlEncodeOutput = true;
Or you will get an error message.
Later on display
You will need to decode is like:
<%=HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(Html.TextAreaFor(model => model.Description).ToHtmlString())%>
Good luck!

Related

Using Sage in a website that needs to be maintained by mere mortals

I am trying to help out an organization that hired some developers to create their website back in 2016, and the developers haven't touched the site since 2016.
I don't know enough about Sage to know if the developers really screwed things up, or if what they have done is the way things need to be done in Sage. One example of something that has me scratching my head (in between banging it on my keyboard): some page content - content that needs to be updated on at least a yearly basis - is hard-coded into template files, so that in order to update the information, you have to go in past the warnings about using the Theme Editor, figure out which included template contains the content, and update it there.
NOT something your typical office employee is likely to be able to do, yes?
My question is: is it even worth trying to keep this site running under Sage, or should I rebuild the site using a more user-friendly template? The site currently has fewer than 2 dozen pages plus a dozen or so posts and I would say is unlikely to get a whole lot larger, given the available resources.
Thanks for any advice you can offer.
The problem to me doesn't seem to be so much about the Roots Sage theme framework, but that the developers didn't follow the most basic rules regarding WordPress theme development--separating the content from presentation. Hardcoding content into a template is just bad practice, and this would make any site difficult to edit no matter what framework it was built on.
If it's as simple as printing the content into a template so that page editor content changes can be reflected on the frontend, it may be a simple as adding the_content() to the corresponding page template overrides and removing the hardcoded content.
FWIW: Sage 8 templates are not that different from your standard WP templates, it's not using a templating engine like Blade, so you should be able to customize the templates if you're already familiar with standard WP templates.
So probably no need to burn it all down.

What's the recommended way to migrate from Kendo UI for jQuery to Kendo UI for Angular2?

Disclaimer: I have zero experience with Telerik products, but see Kendo UI as something that's definitely interesting to work with. I have worked with Angular2 and other component-based frameworks before.
I recently received an existing code base that makes use of Kendo UI for jQuery (specifically the 2016 Q1 SP1 version), and got tasked with migrating to a component-based design. Search results gave me Kendo UI for Angular2, which seems like an excellent choice. An interesting thing to note for me, is that it's still a release candidate -- it has been released less than a month ago, as of time of writing, but according to the text on the web page it's production-ready.
At first glance they seem partially compatible (as in same components, and similar APIs), and I have some ideas on how to migrate, but would appreciate input of others (that are more experienced with the previous and current Kendo UI types) on this matter.
Some ideas I have:
Run both versions simultaneously, and migrate entire pages. This way they won't interfere with each other, and anything encountered that can be turned into a component or service can be converted.
Put the entire thing into a Angular2 application, and use both Kendo UI for jQuery and Kendo UI for Angular2 on the same pages until everything is migrated. I'm uncertain whether there will be any conflicts here, but I think this is possible with proper encapsulation.
I'm definitely interested in other views regarding this, as more experienced people have probably already solved this issue.

Generate a business letter for 100+ leads using wkhtmltopdf

We need to print Business Letter for a given list with mail merge facilities.
My client is not willing to spend $$ on a paid ASP.NET control to make PDF. So I opted in for WKHTMLtoPDF and it works fine for us until one day the client tried to get a PDF of 100+ leads, resulting in complete failure of PDF generation. It works just fine with a 10-20 page PDF, but not for 100.
Are there any tips & tricks to improve performance? We are using Cloud-hosted IIS 7 with ASP.NET 4 if that matters.
PDFSharp library is really a nice one!
I have used it for quite a while now, and I find it flexible enough to fulfill your needs.
However there are some aspects of using it as a "standalone library" - e.g creating tables is a headache and there aren't much text formatting options. It is much better to mix it together with MigraDoc (an extension library for PDFSharp).
If you're looking for a really free (as in "free of worries") library, choose iTextPDF versions prior to version 4.1.7, as they state in the ByteScout blog.
From the ByteScout blog:
iTextSharp 4.1.6 DLL only: itextsharp-4.1.6-dll.zip
iTextSharp 4.1.6 Source Code (C#): itextsharp-4.1.6.zip
I'm not sure I understand your problem but couldn't you generate docx documents and get the same results?
For all, I use http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ to create HTML to PDF, my ASP.NET code generate the HtML file then I create HTML to PDF and it is done, much easier than using itextpdf's Table and td structure to get things in better space. I found it easy and fast once you get your stuff aligned properly.
library has improved since original question asked and it performs better now.
here is good tutorial http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/20640/Creating-PDF-Documents-in-ASP-NET

Content Management System - PHP - Asp.Net

I am new to open source Content Management System tools. I got a website using Joomla for content management. Now, I am just thinking to Umbraco or Dotnetnuke (any Asp.net based) frameworks to use. Will it be a complex to do this migration. Can you suggest pros and cons for this idea.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks !
For Umbraco ...
Most of your client-side code like HTML, CSS and JavaScript can just be copied straight over, but as expected it may require some fiddling.
As for the data, it might be worth looking into the CMSImport module for Umbraco. As long as you can convert the source data into one of the formats recognised by the module, you should be able to upload your content with ease. I've had no personal experience with this module, but should be worth a shot.
It really depends on the size of the site and the functionality requirements. For smaller sites, it may be as easy as implementing the skin based on the original design (or, if a custom design isn't needed, selecting a free or 3rd party skin) and then manually migrating the content. For really large sites, you should be able to write scripts to migrate the content. I'm not aware of any products that do this. You'll also probably need to select some modules to use for things like forms.

What hosted-commenting tools produce clean markup?

You may be familiar with IntenseDebate, Disqus, and their ilk. These tools produce wretched markup that pollutes my pages significantly and is difficult to style correctly.
I have a site which is statically generated. Are there hosted commenting options that are simple, clean, unobstrusive, and easy to style?
The solution I settled on was using hosted-commenting JSON APIs plus JS templating. You give up the social-media button widgets and you have to roll some of your own comment form, but that's ultimately a small price to pay in my book.

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