WYSIWYG text box entry
Submitted by jskates on Wed, 08/29/2007 - 01:27.
I know this has probably come up before... but projects tend to generate a lot of formatted content such as un-ordered and ordered lists. Other similar common needs are (P) (BR) (B) (I) (UL) etc... I don't know that you need something overly sophisticated... but enough to create some structured content would be very useful.
Actually PP has some formatting capabilities (at least in the messages) using Textile.
We already filed a feature request to replace this with the Markdown syntax (we are using this at pp.org and it is more user friendly IMHO). We already discussed adding a wysiwyg editor (like FCK or TinyMCE) to PP.
Until now there is no decision about that since we are working on 0.8.
I would be very very careful before choosing to use any kind of WYSIWYG editor with PP, my experience with WordPREss, which uses TinyMCE, has been that when ther's a problem with posting, the solution is almost always 'turn off the WYSIWYG editor'. They tend to break things at an unprecedented pace and are often as confusing as syntax to use.
I suppose that because PP wont' have things like youtube videos embedded very often it mimght not be as deadly to have a WYSIWYG editor mucking up the html, but overall it will be a huge effort to keep it stable and not making a mess.
Markdown and textile are both unfamiliar to almost everyone but web designers. BBcode is a bit more common but also not so popular that it's worth using. Maybe something like the quicktags used in wordpress and drupal could work (buttons that open and close html for you), but they kind of depend on you at least being open to the idea of learning the concepts behind some html.
I have the same experience with a group of wordpress author (non heavy users) in my sports club. We had a lot of trouble with copy/paste from MS word or other websites. So we decided to switch off WYSIWYG for all authors.
And we have now good experiences with same usergroup with our wiki.
I'm using it in my CMS system. I also developed media plugin (to handle images and files and also ritch media as flash, quicktime, wmv etc). Can't realy say a bad word about it.
Ofcourse there are problems when pasting from Word, but it's alweays because Microsoft send all the styling information and mystical MSo classes with it's markup.