Friday, April 25, 2003
The Joy of Not-So Rich Text Editors
Having worked on content management systems on and off for years, you find yourself always looking for a decent rich text editor. It's something that still gets gasps from clients -- regardless of how useless it is in practice.
We seem to be leaning toward SOEditor these days. For now we have included their SOEditor Lite version in the Opensource build of FarCry with hooks to easily upgrade to the professional version.
Recently with the release of Mozilla 1.3 the rich text editor market is becoming interesting again. The Mozilla team are putting in hooks to the in-built HTML editor that is part of the Mozilla project. It'll be interesting to see what sort of cross platform text editors emerge from this.
Of course if you don't believe me that this area is a crowded place, look no further than this Rich Text Editor List
For me though? What brings me joy is the simple things in life like Textile. I stumbled across this little gem reading Sean Voisen's blog via the Goog of course!
Posted by modius at 06:45 PM | Permalink
Trackback: http://blog.daemon.com.au/cgi-bin/dmblog/mt-tb.cgi/112
Geoff,
We have been using the soEditor lite version here at our operation (State Gov, trying to save as much $$ as possible.) and it has been fairly positive for us. Some problems arise when users cut and paste from word, because of bad HTML generation in the activeX component. We also are using the RTE editor in our newest in-house content manager, which has somewhat nicer HTML generation (why I don't know) but other features are left to be desired. We are migrating to Contribute, and our content providers who have moved to it have finally started to be more productive. We still have some issues with moving from our previously built dynamic content (time and effort, mostly), but we are most likely going to move to that model for content providers, and use the data-driven content model for things like news, applications, and other items that we replicate across the site.
Micah
Posted by: Micah Douglas on April 25, 2003 10:05 PM
I just looked at textism, it looks cool. The blog is great stuff too.
Posted by: Micah Douglas on April 25, 2003 10:13 PM
I am slowly putting together an online editor that output clean XHTML code. Check the url (it's the italian CFUG website):
http://www.cfmentor.com/code/index.cfm?action=zipped&id=11
The custom tag have a small set of documentation written in english
Massimo
Posted by: Massimo Foti on April 25, 2003 11:29 PM
I hear your pain Geoff, loud and clear. I've spent countless hours finding and hunting the holy grail, a WYSIWYG editor tool for a CMS thats X-Browser, X-Platform compatible..
The day someone makes this, is the day they will become very rich indeed (even more so if it doesn't go ape on your formating.. that and makes it all nice and XFORM/XHTML etc compliant)..
I'm sadly finding Mozilla to be the overall bain of existance when it comes to DOM coding, I'm finding Opera/IE more stable then the Mozilla browsers and thus hope they not only bring out the editor of dreams but fixup alot of the DOM problems.
Posted by: Scott Barnes on April 26, 2003 04:38 PM
'the list' is a great resource, thanks. unfortunatley, most of those wysiwyg wouldn't know unicode from a hole in the ground, that includes most of the commericial ones as well (or perhaps especially). i would think a nice, free or cheapo flash based, unicode compliant one would be best. any ideas?
Posted by: Paul Hastings on April 27, 2003 04:44 PM
I think a flash one is what people really need to use. Flash doesnt seem to allow images or tables, but for core features it seems to be better and very cross broswer. A good one I found is myrichtext.com
Posted by: Matt Rice on September 12, 2003 12:12 PM
If you're looking for a free, unicode, xhtml 1.1 compliant editor have a look at xstandard (lite): http://www.xstandard.com
I integrated this with the Mambo CMS (http://www.mamboserver.com) and it's now part of the standard distribution.
It's an activex component but I've found it very worthwhile.
cheers
Meint
Posted by: Meint on April 25, 2004 11:39 PM
We started using XStandard about a month ago. Nice editor. We are quite pleased with the clean markup it creates.
Posted by: Russ on April 28, 2004 07:19 AM
Geoff,
We have been using the soEditor lite version here at our operation (State Gov, trying to save as much $$ as possible.) and it has been fairly positive for us. Some problems arise when users cut and paste from word, because of bad HTML generation in the activeX component. We also are using the RTE editor in our newest in-house content manager, which has somewhat nicer HTML generation (why I don't know) but other features are left to be desired. We are migrating to Contribute, and our content providers who have moved to it have finally started to be more productive. We still have some issues with moving from our previously built dynamic content (time and effort, mostly), but we are most likely going to move to that model for content providers, and use the data-driven content model for things like news, applications, and other items that we replicate across the site.
Micah
Posted by: Micah Douglas on April 25, 2003 10:05 PM
I just looked at textism, it looks cool. The blog is great stuff too.
Posted by: Micah Douglas on April 25, 2003 10:13 PM
I am slowly putting together an online editor that output clean XHTML code. Check the url (it's the italian CFUG website):
http://www.cfmentor.com/code/index.cfm?action=zipped&id=11
The custom tag have a small set of documentation written in english
Massimo
Posted by: Massimo Foti on April 25, 2003 11:29 PM
I hear your pain Geoff, loud and clear. I've spent countless hours finding and hunting the holy grail, a WYSIWYG editor tool for a CMS thats X-Browser, X-Platform compatible..
The day someone makes this, is the day they will become very rich indeed (even more so if it doesn't go ape on your formating.. that and makes it all nice and XFORM/XHTML etc compliant)..
I'm sadly finding Mozilla to be the overall bain of existance when it comes to DOM coding, I'm finding Opera/IE more stable then the Mozilla browsers and thus hope they not only bring out the editor of dreams but fixup alot of the DOM problems.
Posted by: Scott Barnes on April 26, 2003 04:38 PM
'the list' is a great resource, thanks. unfortunatley, most of those wysiwyg wouldn't know unicode from a hole in the ground, that includes most of the commericial ones as well (or perhaps especially). i would think a nice, free or cheapo flash based, unicode compliant one would be best. any ideas?
Posted by: Paul Hastings on April 27, 2003 04:44 PM
I think a flash one is what people really need to use. Flash doesnt seem to allow images or tables, but for core features it seems to be better and very cross broswer. A good one I found is myrichtext.com
Posted by: Matt Rice on September 12, 2003 12:12 PM
If you're looking for a free, unicode, xhtml 1.1 compliant editor have a look at xstandard (lite): http://www.xstandard.com
I integrated this with the Mambo CMS (http://www.mamboserver.com) and it's now part of the standard distribution.
It's an activex component but I've found it very worthwhile.
cheers
Meint
Posted by: Meint on April 25, 2004 11:39 PM
We started using XStandard about a month ago. Nice editor. We are quite pleased with the clean markup it creates.
Posted by: Russ on April 28, 2004 07:19 AM