Edit a Comment

[Dave-Skye]

Hello

I have noticed some odd behaviour.

I have setup the comments on a blog (Joomla 4.4.1 with Gantry 5). If I try and edit my own comment it opens the editor (JCE) on the homepage of my website.
I don't expect this is how it was designed. I would have thought it should open below the blog article being commented upon.
Hope this make sense.
Any ideas how to force the edit to stay on the same page?

Cheers. - Dave.

[nikosdion]

This is exactly how it is supposed to work. You edit your comment in a new page. That page does not have an Itemid, therefore Joomla! uses the default one (home page). NORMALLY nothing else shows on the page except modules and the component.

[Dave-Skye]

Hello Nikosdion

Good to hear from you!
It’s not the best user experience to be taken away from the blog to make the edit.
Is there any way to edit a comment and to keep the user on the same page as the comment they are editing?
Cheers. – Dave.

[nikosdion]

You, or anyone else, is welcome to submit a Pull Request implementing something like that if you know a way to do it that does not involve popups or IFRAMEs (both are blocked in most practical use cases). I can tell you upfront that I do not know of any way to trigger the Joomla! WYSIWYG editor without loading a new page, or at least I do not know of any reliable, sustainable way to do that which would work with any WYSIWYG editor (as in: not just JCE and TinyMCE), nor have I seen anyone else doing that. If I am missing something, I would love to stand corrected; I have plenty of use cases where instantiating a Joomla! editor dynamically in client-side code would make a lot of sense even outside Engage itself.

[Dave-Skye]

Hello

Could the comment edit link not just trigger a page refesh and then load the editor on the current page, rather than a redirect back to the home page?

Cheers. - Dave.

[nikosdion]

Joomla itself uses a separate editor page for everything which can be edited in the frontend. Articles, modules, user profiles… all of them they have a separate edit and view page with completely different structure. Think about why is that.

My software is mass distributed. I do things in a way which will cause the least problems for most users. If this does not fit your particular use case, you can ask me if I am able and willing to implement it. If I can, I will. If I can't, I will tell you so. I am not required to explain my reasoning, or answer question after question about it.

You don't have to trust my judgement. The license of the software allows and encourages you to modify it as you see fit. If you do, you can of course share your modifications with me by making a Pull Request. If it's something usable in the generic mass distributed use case I will gladly accept it and include it in the software with attribution. If not, I will tell you why I can't.

So, to come back to your question. No, I cannot use the same page. For usability reasons it would only work if a. we were able to swap out the editor using client-side (JavaScript) code and b. if it was absolutely guaranteed that the editor would be in visible and in focus when we do that. The former is not something that Joomla! allows, and we need it to prevent conundrums like “what if someone starts editing their comment, but change their mind and decide to instead post a reply” which is a VERY real issue in all comment systems (which is why, by the way, all comment systems which allow edits use some kind of markup language, or their own limited editor, or a separate page / popup to edit comments). The latter is simply not true; at the very least, we have features which can hide the editor area and accounting for all of that starts making things impractical. And I have not even touched CACHING which immediately makes this whole notion of reusing the same page for editing a comment completely moot without the ability to change the editor using client-side code.

These and many other issues did cross my mind when deciding how to best implement the feature to edit a comment. I decided on the separate page because it's ultimately the least problematic solution. You either edit your comment, or not. If you cancel or go back, the comment remains unedited. If you post the change, the comment is updated (and the cache is busted, through a very convoluted process, because the only way to do that in Joomla! is to actually clear the entirety of articles front-end caching, and even then that only works if you have not enabled the page cache plugin!).

As I said, if you can find a way to do it, show me the code. Otherwise you are just going step by step through everything that went through my mind three plus years ago and which ultimately led me to implementing things the way they are currently implemented.