This is just a short post on how to use js-emoji in Django.
PMT has had
emoji support for a while through
django-emoji.
No one ever uses it though, because users have no idea that their
comments go through a filter that renders text like
:tomato: into an image.
Sites like GitHub display a dropdown menu of emoji "suggestions" as soon as you type a colon into a comment box. I haven't implemented the js-suggester behavior yet, but we're one step closer now that the markdown previews in javascript are going through an emoji filter.
See where I've added emoji code in
markdown_preview.js.
One thing to note is that js-emoji uses emoji images from
emoji-data.
Initially, I had included the img-apple-64 and img-apple-160
directories in our django application, which comprise of over
100MB and over 3000 separate image files. This caused a timeout
problem in our deployment process, even after I manually uploaded
these files to S3 where the assets are stored. Fortunately,
js-emoji allows you to instead specify an emoji "sheet" using
the use_sheet option. I removed the 3000 images and
I'm now using the apple sheets from emoji-data.