Inline replies have been in use on Lithium / Khoros communities using the support theme for a while now. This is the functionality whereby users can use a full editor to craft their reply right within the topic page. Basically quick reply with a full editor.
Given that this is a common design pattern in (social network and similar) websites today I would like to know when Khoros is thinking of productizing this functionality so more communities can have a modern reply experience?
Currently this still involves a paid professional service engagement to gain a feature which should be standard 😐
😋Themes were / are an attempt to come up with some better out of the box experiences for Khoros community on launch that are tailered to certain use cases like support or marketing. Not sure how alive this still is with Khoros Professional Services, but part of the support streamlining was improving a rich reply experience through inline replies.
We’re just about to roll it out on Workshop. It did require plenty of work as out of the box is not usable. But I do agree that it’s a better experience for users and more in line with the what they expect/are used to from other social platforms.
We have had an open reply box for a while at the bottom of each thread as a quick way of entering the discussion and hopefully a strong CTA - a customisation if quick reply - but it confused many users why they couldn’t upload photos or access the other toolbar functionality. Inline RTE definitely superior to what we had.
Jason
Yes, quick reply experience is just too behind which is why we aren't thinking of pushing much. We even doubt it would be worth enabling it in profile defaults.
@JasonHill Did you develop this yourself or involve Khoros PS to get it done?
I'm also curious about this as well. We would like to implement this functionality in our community, and it would be much better OOTB than as a customization.
We did it ourselves @Claudius .
For those that want to investigate it for themselves, the component that is used is called inline reply
<component id="messages.widget.reply-inline-button" renderInputPlaceholder="true" message="lia-message:env"/>
You can add the component above to the ForumMessage quilt.
This component renders a faux text area under each message that when clicked will make the tinymce editor appear.
But it has a different behaviour for the root message.
Khoros PS quoted 8 hours of dev work for replicating the same experience as here on the Atlas community. The Khoros work would have been to add some CSS/JS that initially hides the faux text area as well as a button that when clicked calls a click on the text area and unhides it.
Hope that is useful for anyone considering implementing it.
Jason
Thanks @StanGromer, will let everyone know when we move it onto the production site so you can take a look.
Jason
