Drupal WYSIWYG editor disappointment
As I've been setting up my site in Drupal, I've been really struggling to find a decent WYSIWYG editor. I've tried nicEdit, WYMedit, and YUIeditor and none of them is useful.
I can't get YUIeditor to do simple things like links and the menu bar at the top takes more than a third of the editing space.
nicEdit is ok, but does not show images placed as they will show up in the final post. That's a deal killer - I might as well write the HTML by hand at that point. And paragraph breaks are a joke. You have to enter fn+return to get a real paragraph break. What's up with that? If you just press return, you get the same visual result in the editor window, but the breaks don't show up when you publish. And the HTML it spits out is atrocious.
I had high hopes for WYMedit, but alas, it also spits out atrocious HTML, and has no more fidelity than nicEdit.
Oh well. I will continue to search for an editor that works. I wonder if there's a way to get markdown syntax in blog postings. That might be the best bet for now. I'll keep searching. I may just give up and start hacking away with HTML.
Ouch. Sorry to hear about the problems with all those editors. I’ve been using TinyMCE, but not because I love it. It does at least do some basic image uploading (with the IMCE.module) and previewing in place as well as links and such. I thought nicEdit looked interesting but to not have the basics like paragraph breaks is a pain! Let’s hope that state of these things improves quickly!
I know there are a number of people who complain about it but check out tinymce. It will take a bit to get it configured right. You can, also, tie it into the IMCE module.
its almost ok. I haven’t found one better at this point. Here is an install guide:
http://geoffhankerson.com/drupal-and-web-services/installing-tinymce-drupal-5-screencast.html
It’s not great, but it works. It takes some configuring, including the settings to make sure that it outputs clean HTML. Unlike those other tools, it’s also used in MANY other places….like Wordpress … so it’s not going anywhere any time soon.
I recommend combining it with image_assist.
I use html on http://drupal.geek.nz but that’s mostly because I am running unstable drupal 6 CVS HEAD. If I was running drupal 5 I’d use TinyMCE. Although TinyMCE is kinda cumbersome to setup.
A colleague of mine at CivicActions (Doug Green) is doing nicEdit for Drupal. I’ll ping him with your feedback as he’ll be interested.
I have the same complaints about WYSIWYG editors, which is why I started the nicEdit project. nicEdit is a brand new editor, under development, and not ready for production yet. Please don’t write it off based on an early attempt. There’s a long list of known shortcomings that are being worked on. It’s my hope that with some community support, that nicEdit can become THE editor for Drupal.
http://drupal.org/project/marksmarty does markdown quite nicely.
I agree that finding a really good WYSIWYG editor is hard. A lot of this is down to the fact that the native browser WYSYWYG widgets are not very good and generally produce nasty code (which the library then needs to fix).
Hi Jeff, I found your site through Acquia. I hope that everything goes well for you and Acquia as a whole since its success will significantly benefit the Drupal project. It seems Acquia are assembling an incredible team.
I thought I'd tried most of the Drupal WYSIWYG editors but had not heard of nicEdit and not yet tried YUIeditor. Although you don't recommend them, I'll give them a look anyway.
Personally, for long posts, I prefer to use Markdown in TextMate and it works well. I am also very happy to use BUEditor and I highly recommend it if you just require a simple editor to help compose HTML directly in Drupal.
Of course, these are not ideal solutions for non-technical users. I run a UK-based web design/ecommerce/content management services company and our clients don't have the technical ability to use Markdown (or worse, HTML) to format their content. I have found that TinyMCE is the closest to what we need but there are still problems meaning there is no really effective WYSIWYG solution for Drupal.
It's probably no small task to build a WYSIWYG specifically for Drupal and maybe this is something Acquia will be working on. I certainly hope so.
P.S. I just noticed that you have Markdown as an input format, I didn't know it existed so will have a look at that, too. Thanks!
You’re not the only one. There’s a GHOP task to compare all Drupal wysiwyg editors. And the resulting Handbook page just in.
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