So I’ve made a first pass at a WYSIWYG plugin using widgEditor. For some reason it doesn’t work on the simple post screen, just the advanced one. It’s in the repository if anyone has any suggestions. Todo: prettier/smaller buttons, strip/add paragraph tags, activate for more than just the main content area.
I just installed it, and I generally like what I see, but not only does the WYSIWYG not work in the Simple post area (what I use, usually, just because), it removes the existing tag-insertion buttons that were there.
Deactivated, but not deleted, until there’s a workaround for the Simple post page or there’s a plugin update.
Would something like this ever be included by default in WordPress?
I installed the plugin. When I went back to edit a post I had made with the plugin, it erased whatever content was there when the post loaded into the textarea.
Will, yes the workaround is to switch to the advanced interface as the default.
Chris, if all the kinks are worked out, possibly.
Jeremy, that’s pretty scary sounding. Did you “go back” with the back button, or did you edit the post again, was there content on the site?
Testing it out on my testblog and wow is it nice. I think it needs a few more features though but that’s the actual editor. I won’t push this on my real blog yet though.
Ideally I’d love for it to have as few features as possible. It does what it does very well.
The only reason I said more features is like the check spelling from Blogger, remove formatting from selection, Blockquote, and aligning. I may be asking for too much but it does remove a lot of quicktags which were useful.
Why not go for the full htmlarea? I installed on my domain and although I never use it, I think it helps people with a Word background. Let’s face it, that’s where most WP users come from…
I created a test post, published it, then viewed the post in a seperate tab. Then I went to Manage > Posts, and clicked Edit.
BTW, I was using Firefox 1.0 on Mac OS X 10.3.
Matt, you rock. Keep up with the improvements, this looks really promising. Was this in response to any reflections based on Dave Winer’s recent writings?
Matt, as I noted on the wp-hackers list, the lists this script produces aren’t always valid XHTML. Try creating three lines of text. Select them all and click the list button. Then select the middle item and press TAB to put it to the next lower level… then look at the HTML produced. In fact, it seems that every time you go back and change the level of an item, this happens. The only way it doesn’t happen is if you use TAB to indent before you move on to the next item.
It might be over the top (man, there are a lot of features in it) but what about http://www.fckeditor.net/?
Matt, other than my suggestions this is an awesome plugin.
When you load up the post screen it takes a few seconds to initialize.
What Carl says sounds obvious, but indeed — it seems to go faster on the widgEditor test page.
This is a great plugin.
I think I found some small bug, though: when editing text with entities in it, then viewing the HTML source, the entities aren’t translated.
…but that’s of course a widgEditor bug, not something wrong with the plugin.
The editor Toby S linked to is nice but it’s also bloated and is slow in Firefox.
Actually on second though the one Toby S showed isn’t bad. It allows for much customization and flexibility. It’s not slow and it has the ability to change to a basic toolbar if the user finds the advanced one confusing. It also has multi-lingual support and even skkins so it can fit the WordPress interface. Maybe you can try it.
Nice. Might be a useful addition to WordPress: Touched that… something to think about for a 1.0 release I guess 🙂
I’m yet to be won over by these type of tools tho. I think the quick tags work jsut as well – until I can use ctrl+b for bold.. etc then I really don’t see the difference from this and the quicktags – in fact the quick tags are more powerful because I can edit the markup. In this one its removing that option.
Actually both demos if you click the magnifying glass it shows the source.
Seems FCKeditor has the same problem with invalid lists that widgEditor has…
matt, a wysiwyg plugin is a good idea. but this one is just as slow, bloated, buggy and crippled as the other ones i tried…
i wish someone would set up some kind of web-service api to plug Front Page or Dreamweaver into…
or maybe a XUL interface for wordpress would be appropriate. at least you’d be sure there are no bugs in it — only firefox users could use it.
Well.. that doesn’t mean there’d be no bugs 😉
Its not perfect, but its better than most of the type.
I missed the code view option. That raises it up a notch. Its… promising. I’m going to add it to the next (or maybe next but one) release of my plugin.
It’s okay, as such things go, but I would prefer it not become the default post-editor for WordPress. I like to have more control over my code than that.
Of course, I suppose it could always be made another option: WYSIWYG / Simple / Advanced.
Works great! only one problem… doesn’t seem to work for pages, just for posts. Is there a way to specify that it be used for the input field within the pages editor?