Knowledge Base Article

Aurora: About the Content Editor

The Content Editor is the main tool you use to write your posts, articles, and replies/comments in the community. The Aurora editor is similar to editors you’ve used in other applications and should feel familiar.

The Aurora Content Editor boasts several features, including:

  • Consistent and optimized toolbars
  • Robust, rich text editor, with emoji support
  • Support for image and video uploads
  • In-line image editing
  • Visual display options for code samples
  • Keyboard shortcuts

Consistent and optimized toolbars

The Content Editor toolbars have been optimized for specific use cases and displays. Aurora includes these toolbar variants:

  • Desktop
  • Mobile
  • Reply/Comment Desktop
  • Reply/Comment Mobile

Desktop (for all content types)

The Desktop toolbar provides the most robust toolbar.

 

Note: The Insert template function (not shown) is off by default. You can enable this feature via Community Settings.

  • Top row buttons
    • Format
    • Bold
    • Italic
    • Underline
    • Strikethrough
    • Text color
    • Bullet list
    • Numbered list
    • Text alignment
    • Insert link
    • Insert media (image or video)
    • Insert emoji
    • Insert table
    • Expand menu
  • Bottom row buttons
    • Quote
    • Insert/Edit code
    • Insert Spoiler (show/hide text block)
    • Increase indent
    • Decrease indent
    • Table of Contents
    • Clear formatting
    • View/Edit source code
    • Help (keyboard shortcuts)

Mobile

On mobile devices, where screen real estate is at a premium, the toolbar includes only the most common actions:

Buttons

  • Format
  • Bold
  • Italic
  • Underline
  • Strikethrough
  • Text color
  • Bullet list
  • Numbered list
  • Text alignment
  • Insert link
  • Insert media (image or video)
  • Quote
  • Insert/Edit code
  • Insert spoiler (show/hide text block)
  • Increase indent
  • Decrease indent
  • Clear formatting

Reply/Comment toolbars

Fewer editing options are available when replying in a discussion or commenting on a post or article. Options include:

  • Bold
  • Italic
  • Bullet list
  • Numbered list
  • Quote
  • Insert link
  • Insert media (image or video)
  • Insert emoji
  • Attach file
  • Insert / Edit code
  • Help

Enhanced emoji support

The Content Editor provides community admins with a lot more flexibility over which emojis to make available as well as the ability to create a custom set of emojis. For example, you might want to create emojis specific to your brand or products.

Other enhanced emoji features include:

  • Emoji name displayed on hover: Hover over an emoji in the content editor or in the published message to see the name of the emoji.
  • Emoji alias support: Manually type in the alias for an emoji (for example, “:smiley:”) without using the auto-suggest menu the emoji renders.

Learn more about enabling emojis.

Visual display for code samples

The Content Editor provides color coding for code samples in your posts to improve overall readability.

To enter code samples:

  1. Click Insert Code.

  2. Search for the code language you want to use.

     

  3. Start typing (or copy/paste) your code sample.

  4. Click Insert.

The Content Editor displays the color-coded version of your code sample:

Inline link editing

Content Editor supports quick inline link editing so when you click on a link or use the arrow keys to move the cursor over a link in your post, the inline link pop-up menu displays:

 

From the inline link pop-up menu, you can click:

  • Edit Link: Opens the link editing window where you can change the existing link.
  • Unlink: Removes the link associated with this text.
  • Auto Title: Displays the title of the linked webpage for the link text. (If the Auto Title is active, this button is grayed out.)
  • Show URL: Displays the full URL of the linked text.
  • Open Link: Opens the linked URL in a new browser tab.

In-line image editing

When writing or editing content with embedded images, you perform several quick editing actions.

While editing your content, you can click an image to access the size controls. Click the small, medium, or large options to choose the image size that best fits your space.

You can align the image to the left, center, or right or choose not to align them. By default, all the inserted images and videos are center-aligned irrespective of their size or device. The alignment icons indicate image alignment and text wrapping around the images. 

You can also add a caption for your image, which displays below the image.

Also, you can link a URL to the image.

Finally, you can click the person icon to add Alternative text that describes the image for the visually-impaired.


Upload video on mobile

The Content Editor supports mobile video uploads (up to 9.5 GB; default is 50 MB) from your iOS or Android device. Click the Insert Media icon on your mobile device and choose to take a video or upload an existing video from your Photo library.

Note: This feature applies only to communities that have video upload enabled. Image and video upload are initiated via the same Media icon on mobile. If video upload had not been enabled for the community, only the image upload option would be available.

Drag and drop images, videos, and attachments

You can drag and drop images, videos, and file attachments directly to the content editing pane for all content types (forums, blogs, KBs, etc.) or as attachments to the article/post.

Note: Constraints for image, video, and file attachments (for example, supported file types and maximum file size) are all based on the admin settings configured by your community administrator. Learn more about setting up and configuring settings and permissions for image uploads, video uploads, and file attachments.

Drag and drop directly into the message editor

To drag and drop images or videos into the editing pane of an article, post, or comment, find the image or video you want to add and drag it into the writing area:

Your image uploads and renders in the editor:

Note: When using the Safari browser, any files dragged and dropped into the message editor that are not supported/cannot be displayed inline by the message editor are automatically attached to the message instead.

Drag and drop attachments

Authors can also quickly add attachments to posts/comments by dragging and dropping them here:

Or, they can click browse to launch the file chooser and select the file to attach.

Attached files are uploaded and displayed next to the post:

Shortcuts

If you’re a keyboard shortcuts person, you can find all the keyboard accelerators under the Content Editor Help.

 

 

Updated 6 months ago
Version 10.0

3 Comments

  • in our HermesTheme community we had to ask Khoros to add language packs to the Code Editor to support our preferred code language/syntax highlighting.

    Will this be the same basic approach in Aurora?
    or will this capability be delegated to the Community Manager?

  • VedanthY's avatar
    VedanthY
    Khoros Alumni (Retired)
    2 years ago

    Hi Lief ,

    Thanks for sharing your concern.

    Aurora Communities' code blocks by default support several languages including Tcl, YAML, JSON, Nginx, Python, Powershell, Javascript, Bash, Regex, HTML, Markdown, Markup, Apache Configuration, AsciiDoc, Go, Perl, PHP, XML, SQL, CSS, Java, Ruby, C, C#, C++ and many others. I believe this would cover F5's requirements and no further customizations would be needed. 

    Also, we have introduced line numbers in code blocks in Aurora communities.

    Hope this helps,

    Best,

    Vedanth,

    Community PM Team.