WYSIWYG.. What the...

[Dan-G]

I have been using this CMS for over 4 years and am always impressed by the distinctives that make it stand out from the many other choices available. I am also very thankful for OG and his efforts that make this CMS a top choice for designers. One thing however, that I am never impressed with is the WYSIWYG editor and I need to ask 'what is going on?!'

- Every time I download phpwcms the editor works completely different. In fact, previously I had been using the SPAW editor (did TinyMCE come on the scene for a while?), now SPAW is discontinued and replaced with CKeditor which doesn't even have the ability to add images.

- Out of the box the controls are either too restrictive (no ability to change headings) or too many.

- The editor works so badly it is laughable. On my browsers it frequently won't even allow paste from the clipboard. What it does to the source code is horrible. I actually find it so difficult to use I always work in the source code. Even then it wants to change what I write.

- If I find it this unusable how can I expect my clients to have any hope of getting it to work. No wonder after a few months web sites look such a mess. The end user gets so frustrated that they figure out how to turn all the controls on and out comes red text, comic sans etc.

- Wordpress. There we go. I said it. I've been using Wordpress for blogs on some of my phpwcms web sites for obvious reasons. Putting aside how easy it is to install in 5 minutes and upgrade (literally took me 5 seconds), this platform NEEDS to learn something about how they do WYSIWYG editor. It works so well. I wouldn't want to change a thing about how it works. My observation is that it works a bit like the plain text editor so there are no <p></p> all over the source but still allows tags like <strong> <em> etc. Copy and paste from a word document is not even an option with FCK - my experience of Wordpress is it works flawlessly. Image, video, upload all work like a treat.

- Images. I was so pleased to see integration with the native file manager. Good work. This is such a weclome feature. However, it causes a great deal of confusion as out of the box file upload doesn't work and if it did it wouldn't be uploading to the phpwcms file manager.

All these comments are based on my experience of version 1.4.7 - later snapshots may - and hopefully have - addressed these issues.

The future...

WYSIWYG is the most important CP without question. And for an end user, this is the most important part of the entire CMS. It needs to work better.

It needs to work out of the box. Yes I have tweaked and skinned the editor but remember that 5 minute install? We could become famous for having a 5 hour install... It is not enough for webmasters to have to sort the WYSIWG every time. It needs to work out the box.

What You See Is Invariably NOT What You Get. The css for the editor needs to be in the template/inc_css folder. It's not easy to find otherwise.

Images, files etc... Great steps towards integration with the file - now needs to go all the way.

OG - what is the plan? And which editor will you be settling with?

[axelko]

Hi Dan,

After an new install of phpwcms I alway change I file; include/inc_ext/fckeditor/fckconfig.js and change FCKConfig.ForcePasteAsPlainText = false to true. Now always text is pasted as plain text and the websites look like the should, no strange fonts, colors and other nasty stuff.

I have a lot of customers that update websites themselves and almost no complains.

Greetz,

Axel

[marcus@localhorst]

my experience with WYSIWYG is always bad too, because all the Word copy&paste customers.
And it behaves different in every browser.
I use just a minimal setup of standard formatting. no need for headlines and custom styles. they never get it.
Never let them include images in editor - they have to use my templates.

I welcomed the integration of Textile for the Plain Text CP in newer phpwcms version and sometimes I am completely deactivate Editors for the whole site and wrote a custom script to parse any text content with the textile parser, even for non Plain Text CP.
It's the best way to control markup.
Another way would be to filter the whole WYSIWYG editor content on the front-end with something like that: http://www.bioinformatics.org/phplabwar ... /htmLawed/ to get rid of the crap formatting.

In the past weeks I worked with Joomla and JCE editor (I think it's Tiny MCE clone?), which is nicely integrated with the whole filesystem/media upload etc, but I see the same pitfalls. (mainly pasting from Words).
So I think it's better customer have to use just a small set of formatting options, they have to learn how to use it properly and the webmaster have to find a solution how to keep the output clean.

WYSIWYG is never true for browser implementations. It's always a crook.

[update]

I like the "Style"- dropdown coming with the editor.
I have prepared sets of css and the user can easily mark a paragraph to float it or give it another background.

[walnut]

I have just noticed that when I sign in using admin/password I get an FCK Editor on whyiwyg templates but when another user, even with admin privledges, signs in they get the CK Editor in basic format without even the ability to view the source code.

I changed this line (45) from 1 to 2 but it did not seem to do anything:

$phpwcms['wysiwyg_editor'] = 2; //0 = no wysiwyg editor, 1 = CKEditor, 2 = FCKeditor


It looks to me like this line (73) might hold the answer but I don't know what to do. I really would like to use the expanded CKEditor but just getting the Basic FCK with the ability to edit code wold wok.

$phpwcms['wysiwyg_template'] = array( 'FCKeditor' => 'phpwcms_basic,phpwcms_default,Default,Basic', 'CKEditor' => 'phpwcms_basic,phpwcms_default,Default,Basic' );

Does anyone have an suggestions?

[update]

Check the Profile settings in backend!

[walnut]

Thanks -- it is so easy when you know where to look.