While for some people the native Wordpress editor may be sufficient, it’s kinda hard to make some more complex layouts with it’s basic functionnalities.
Integrating Javascript to your content is made impossible as the editor breaks the code and while you can enter some HTML code, it may be broken too as the Wordpress editor replaces some tags. For example, try adding a <div> and you’ll see that upon saving your post, <div> will be changed to a <p> tag.
TinyMCE Advanced Plugin
Wordpress uses TinyMCE, a Javascript content editor. If you’d like to keep using TinyMCE but would like to get advanced features, there’s the TinyMCE Advanced plugin available for free. This plugin adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Full Screen, IESpell, Layer, Media, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras. Together these plugins can add over 40 new buttons to the toolbar.
You can install this plugin the same way you install any other plugins:
- download TinyMCE Advanced
- unzip the archive
- upload the tinymce-advanced directory to your wp-content/plugins folder
- activate the plugin
TinyMCE Advanced gives you the possibilty of customizing the toolbars. Go into Manage => TineMCE Advanced and simply drag the toolbars you want to add to your editor.
What I really like about TinyMCE Advanced is that it can import your theme’s CSS styles.
Advanced TinyMCE Editor Plugin
There is also another Wordpress plugin available at http://www.mkbergman.com/?page_id=383. This plugin adds up to 60 buttons to your Wordpress editor. Installation is pretty much the same as the previous plugin.
Other WYSIWYG Editors
While it’s possible to disable TinyMCE to replace it by third parties editors such as FCKEditor, I still haven’t found one that’s working perfectly out of the box. FCKEditor is in fact one editor I’d like to see integrated into Wordpress as a plugin as I am using it a lot for custom PHP applications I develop.
Still you can try it out but backup your database as using FCKEditor and reverting to TinyMCE may break your post layout.
- Dean’s FCKeditor for WordPress plugin 1.0
- Editor Monkey 0.3 using FCKEditor and TinyMCE
November 26th, 2007 at 12:06 am
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