User friendlier Structured text editor

While Structured Text is a great new feature I don’t think it’s very user friendly since everything must be done with the slash commands. It would be very helpful to also have a more traditional editor UI similar to the markdown editor for marking selected text with something (ie: bold/url) and inserting references to blocks and inline records.

100% agreed. I’d really like to see an option to have a rich-text editor much like the one we see here on Discourse. This would make the rich-text editor experience much friendlier to non-developer folks who are much more used to a fixed formatting toolbar when editing content.

Thanks.

We’re currently exploring which CMS to use for our project, and DatoCMS has made our shortlist. Personally, I love the slash commands - the other users we’ve demo’d to, not big fans. Fairly unanimously they all wanted a GUI way to open the commands panel.

To them, this issue was actually quite a significant barrier to using the platform and several of them said they marked DatoCMS down due to this one issue.

Other than a button to trigger the command panel though, users loved the structured text editor. In particular, we created a block that we called “references” that was a “link_to” type field, and they loved the way this worked.

Please consider adding a “open commands panel” button - even if its an optional setting. Thanks!

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Is there any update on this? Our editors also prefer to have a fixed toolbar at the top. I can find this toolbar when I select “paragraph text” and then the “html editor” but not when using structured text.

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Unfortunately, this is still not planned work :frowning: It’s a reasonable request (and great suggestion), and I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Feature requests are evaluated every new dev cycle, so hopefully this will be picked up at some point soon!

Agreed that the slash commands are a step too far for non-technical clients, who simply need familiar buttons like word processing software. This is the main reason I’ve never used a Structured Text field. I’ll spend too long explaining how it works to my clients.

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And we have launched this: https://www.datocms.com/product-updates/enhancements-to-structured-text :slight_smile:

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