Geeks and God Podcast

Thanks for all the input guys. I am pretty much stuck providing some sort of wysiwig for some of my users. I think I need to find the best minimalist approach to this. Maybe bueditor is the way to do it when and only when I have to do it.

Also, I have head from Rob on image stuff. He uses IMCE. Anyone else using something different with Drupal?

Thanks!
Shrop

I have been demoing the bueditor and ICME with my staff at the work and getting some initial feedback. I am really liking the concept and agree with Rob and MFs arguments here.

A couple of thoughts have come up..

1. Which filter or how do you setup input filters for bueditor?
2. I make my users avoid using tables like the plague (or whatever), but sometimes you do need tables for the real W3C intent and that is for rows and columns of data. Do you create a table button in bueditor or assume that the user should be advanced enough to code a basic table.
3. Another win for me with bueditor is the button creation possibilities. I have header styles that I want users to be able to use in their content if needed. Looks like I could just create buttons for this.. cool.

Wow, you boys really don't like WYSIWYG editors. I sometimes find myself frustrated by damage produced by WYSIWYG editors. But.....

• For myself: I often find them a useful tool for quickly generating markup. After markup is generated I usually quickly switch over to a pure code view to both cleanup any weirdness and augment the code with some additional logic. An alternative is using a text editor with good markup macro's and then doing cut and paste. That isn't as convenient as on site editing though. BUEditor comes close being an onsite macro editor, but is very sparse in what it provides.
• For site contributors: Contributors often need or benefit from an ability to do more than a few simple types of formatting. IMHO... Restricting what they can accomplish, to a memorized vocabulary of XHTML+CSS ends up too restrictive. I think alternatives such as extending something like BUEditor or restricting something like FCKEditor or TinyMCE end up close to the same thing. If I don't provide contributers with any assistance I either get a dearth of formatting or the garbage HTML produced by MS Word. Others promote requiring/offering users a simplified markup grammar such as Textile, but with most people, that seems as unrealistic as getting them to master XHTML+CSS.

In Drupal, I've so far preferred the combination of customized (restricted+extended) WYSIWYG editors and customized Drupal filters.

Regarding the "Toy" nature of formatting through WYSIWYG:
I quite like having the option of quickly toggling between rendered and code views during editing. I wish I'd be able to apply markup macros with equal ease in both these views, but I haven't seen an embedded web editor that supports that well. I regard this type of flexibility a useful feature, not a toy.

BTW:

Oh... I'm mostly using FCKeditor, rather than TinyMCE. Not because I believe its superior, but because, at the moment I was ready to adopt a Drupal editor, the TinyMCE module was going through much chaos.

And.. I'm pretty sold that Tex and LaTex were/are superior for typesetting as well, but I'd never expect your average content creator to learn and apply these.

Mark

That's a good point. I really need to stop using it but its so dang easy sometimes. But I have found times that it makes things look all wacked.
Thanks Rob.....errrrr....Bob. Man that gets me confused sometimes I say Rob, other times Bob. Please Don't get offended if I mistakenly type in Brob one of these days. I can see it coming. :)

John,

I am not sure right off, but you may want to make sure that anonymous is weighted lower than the other roles.

Shrop

If TinyMCE was working for you I'd go back to that. Unless you had a problem with it.

For me, when it comes to user input like blogs, forum posts, etc. I wouldn't rule out TinyMCE.

Remember, if it isn't broke, don't fix it. (Someday I'll learn to take my own advice on this :))

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

John,

I came across this thread while doing some research on using fckeditor and bueditor on the same site but for different users (ie whether there would be any conflicts). Incidentally if anyone has any feedback on that I'd love to hear.

Anyway - I ran into the same issue as you, although for me, Bueditor would show up for User-1 and no one else. I found that a weight of 0 in the bueditor config screen resulted in it not showing up for other users. I changed that to -1 and it worked fine. I'm thinking maybe weight 0 might = no editor.

I realize the thread's a bit dated, so you might've already worked through this.

Don