Symphony.

A new Extension, “Rich Text (TinyMCE) Text Formatter” is now available for download. Comments and feedback can be left here but if you discover any issues, please post it on the issue tracker.

This is a TinyMCE based WYSIWYG editor/formatter. See the README.txt file for more details.

Many thanks to Airlock for funding the development of this extension and choosing to release this under an open source license for all to freely use.

Note: This extension requires Revision 5

Sweet. I'd love to see this integrated into the core.

Just sayin.

I'm actually glad things like this are left out of the core and provided via optional extensions. Personally, I hate WYSIWYG's and prefer a syntax like Markdown or plain HTML. This allows me to keep my Symphony installs nice and personalized.

I agree with wilhelm. No reason to put this in core when it's so easy to plug-in as an extension. This way, when you don't need it, it's not weighing you down. And when your client and users do need it, it takes all of 90 seconds to install...

I hate WYSIWYG's in general because of all the invalid code butchering they allow end-users to do (I don't know where the WYSIWYG part comes in. I never get what I see when my page is published.), but WYMeditor seems like a step in the right direction. End-users lean how to structure their content but don't have to deal with actually coding it.

But to echo czheng, it's best to have this stuff as a plug-in so the core can be clean and speedy. I would seriously consider not using Symphony if it forced me to use TinyMCE. :-P

The biggest problem with all these interactive editors is that they're not cross browser. I enjoy a markdown or textile syntax over interactive editors, as well.

I'm looking at it from a client's standpoint. Would you rather teach someone how to code up textile/markdown, or just give them a rich text editor?

But extension works for me, I think it's awesome either way.

Using the wdm-editor isn't too bad. The end user is still using Markdown but have a quick reference to it if they forget.

Think of this extension like a reference implementation - if you want to use a different editor instead, it should be relatively trivial to modify the code to allow this.

wdm looks great, but it's subscription based, not server side. not for commercial use, but free (at this time)

Scott: did you guys choose TinyMCE for any particular reason?

I'm just wondering if you guys (or anyone else here) have strong opinions on which visual editors you like best (when you need them at all, e.g. for clients, etc.)

I don't know a whole lot about which ones perform well, degrade gracefully, output good code, etc.

I like TinyMCE because it works for most browsers out there and the code is generally clean. I usually install that for clients even though most of them use IE or Firefox and there are many other WYSIWYG plugins out there.

Scott: did you guys choose TinyMCE for any particular reason?

@czheng - I imagine the reason was that TinyMCE was the editor their client asked for! ;)

In addtion to ideas above, I suppose there is also a halfway-house in using one of the “helper toolbars” for Markdown (and there are such things for Textile too). See the attachment for the one I get in my FrogCMS site. There's another example here.

One of the things to like (among others) about WYMeditor is the "paste-from-Word" clean-up that it provides.

D.

Is there a way to plug the TinyMCE editor into Symphony's upload features, so users can upload and add images from the editor?

Hi Matt,

I think it might be possible to do something of this sort via a TinyMCE plugin. Unless I misunderstood, I don't think that there would need to be any cooperation between Symphony and TinyMCE to get this to work - it just needs to upload a file, not also create associated Symphony entries. This functionality doesn't exist in the TinyMCE package, but such a plugin might already exist elsewhere.

The other option, though this is much less friendly, is to put an upload field below the TinyMCE textarea field, then once you save the entry with an image in the upload field, you can just copy and paste its URL into TinyMCE.

When you use this editor, it outputs all the markup as html entities. So when I go and try put this info into my page, i get the actual html markup rendered out on my page. How do I convert it back into html to display correctly? my xsl is a little rusty, haven't been using it much for the past few months =/

<xsl:value-of select="mything" disable-output-escaping="yes" />

ah. thanks tony. works great.

this may seem like a simple question, but for some reason i'm running into this issue. When i switch my text formatter choice from none to the tiny mce option, xml output encodes the html. Now, isn't the only place to encode html through the DS you're using? i checked several of my DSes that would affect what i'm working on, but none of them have HTML-encode text checked off. Any other suggestions of what I could try?