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Oh no, it's a WYSIWYG!
I came across this interesting slide on Drupal Talk:
"Drupal 6 modules" by avorio
In the top 11 modules we're seeing FCKeditor, TinyMCE and the IMCE helper module. Noting that FCKeditor is also in DrupalModules.com's top 3 Most Downloaded list, I think it's time to let go of the "WYSIWYGs are bad" idea. Not all Drupal users are tech-savy people who know their html code or who set their mail clients to display mails in plain text. These people, mostly know as "the client", think it's easier to click the anchor button and filling in the "label" and "url" fields than typing the following out of their head:
[*content* management system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content_management_system)
Confer WYSIWYG vs. "HTML Helper" around 06:22. If I would show this to my client, he would run away screaming. A client recognizes the icons he's familiar with from Word. The big B stands for Bold, the I stands for italic.
On February 4th Gábor posted the battle plan to provide better WYWIWYG support and his posts on the WYSIWYG Drupal Group focus on better input format support. Walking the yellow brick road, a first patch has been committed to Drupal 7. Please note that I'm not saying we should ship Drupal 7 with a rich text editor enabled by default, but we can't just look the other way anymore.
Comments
Not one - ANY!
Since there is more than one editor in this top list, there can only be one conclusion: Drupal core needs support for any client-side editor - whether it is a JavaScript-based or Flash-based, or whatever-based editor.
Introducing support for any Wysiwyg editor is one of the goals of the Wysiwyg API project. It wiill definitely be possible, but requires a well thought-out concept and design that is modular and extensible enough to even support multiple, different editors on the same page.
Developers are very welcome to join these efforts!
Thanks,
Daniel
I love the status report!
The summary is really great. What would help is a link to the active tickets for the items in the "Active" and "Needs work" states. Is there a more extensive document for all these points?
We should have a WYSIWYG
We should have a WYSIWYG editor built in minimally in the Drupal ... Maybe it could disabled by default.
We need to do whatever we can to make Drupal easy to use ... lets forget about adding new features for a while. Make it as easy to use and maintain as latest version of Wordpress.
That means optimizing everything ... just take this Comment Form ... why do we need a subject field ? Why are there 50 lines explaining how to use HTML tags. No one uses them and cares! Why is there even a link for More information about formatting options.
Learn from best. Less options are better. Decide defaults for people.
This is Drupal, not Wordpress
Let's not get into that again, this sounds like an exact duplicate of what Károly describes in "Yes, this is Drupal, not WordPress".
There should be a slim
There should be a slim WYSIWYG editor in core for the basic HTML structuring tasks, which should also integrate with file field to add media to content. An add-on module could then provide more advanced features such as search and replace, etc.
I agree that the comment form subject field could be omitted or should be disabled by default, since it confuses users. Most people do not enter text into it resulting in subject lines like "thanks for your answer, I", which are pointless.
It is not about copying Wordpress or other systems but about improving user experience by adhering to conventions that make sense.
I second wim and sun
I too have many clients with ZERO html skills. They DO NOT want to learn a markup language. Wysiwyg editors are not only the best option -- they are what clients expect.
I'm not sure a built in wysiwyg is the way to go unless someone has the will and need to maintain it and it somehow surpasses the wide variety of 3rd party editors already available.
That being said, I second sun suggesting that the wysiwyg api module is on the right track for extendable wysiwyg support in Drupal.
Simple editor
Perhaps we could ship Drupal 7 with a simple WYSIWYG editor. Just bold, italic, (unordered) lists, links an images. I'm sure that would cover a lot of cases.
I agree that a slim editor
I agree that a slim editor that can be extended by other modules is the way to go. strong, em, a, img, ul/ol and that's it. Filefield and Imagefield can then add their own buttons.
Filtered HTML
I think a good basic starting point would be an editor that can know what's available in the Filtered HTML input list and only provide those buttons.
WYSIWYG buttons based on Filter
I agree that's a good idea, even if it would only be for the elements of the default filtered html input filter. Remember that you can any tag you want to the list and some of those might not be recognized by the WYSIWYG. But a very basic rich text editor or API that can be extended by other modules would be awesome.
TinyTinyMCE
I'm surprised the original TinyMCE module is in that list considering the Drupal 6 version hardly works, the other module TinyTinyMCE is much more reliable and customisable.
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