
Web Based Rich Text Editors Compared - jwilliams
http://bulletproofbox.com/web-based-rich-text-editors-compared/
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thomasmallen
TinyMCE is not viable if users will be pasting content from Word documents,
and generally does a terrible job of dealing with pasted styles...nearly
impossible to override, so you end up pasting into Notepad, etc. etc. At my
job, we're going to migrate our pilot Drupal sites from TinyMCe to FCKEditor
due to this reason alone: To our users (content editors/admins who were stuck
in Contribute before), this makes the Drupal software as a whole look bad.
Even with the "Word Paste" plugin installed for TinyMCE, users have to click a
special "Word Paste" button. This is silly, in FCKEditor you just paste
normally.

One of my least computer-savvy clients for whom I built a Drupal site in the
spring had absolutely no trouble using FCKEditor, while even I have a hard
time wrangling some content in TinyMCE.

In short, TinyMCE's time has come and gone. It's still a decent RTE, but FCK
has definitely surpassed it.

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jkkramer
Even FCK occasionally has issues with pasting content from Word. Plus it's
slow to load. It has improved over time, though, and is generally a reliable
component. Considering the insane constraints rich text editors must operate
under, it does an admirable job.

I tried creating a home-grown editor once. It was hard. Making one that's
simple, predictable, and end-user friendly is nigh impossible.

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thomasmallen
I'm working on a jQuery-based one right now (with a matching Drupal module,
which would make it light-weight, as Drupal bundles jQuery). Once you
understand the nuances of designMode/contentEditable, things get easier, but I
know what you mean about how much you need to consider. It might feel like
wasted time when CKEditor 3 (smart name change, in my opinion), which looks
like the real deal, is released on December 1st.

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jmtame
TinyMCE in Joomla = atrocious.

WordPress also has a surprisingly bad text editor, considering how long
they've been around.

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jwilliams
Think they use this in the Confluence (popular commercial Wiki)... Wasn't
impressed either - table handling could be a bit random.

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thomasmallen
That has as much to do with how bad Confluence Wiki Markup is as anything
else. It doesn't allow _any_ nesting of elements because an open tag is the
same as a close tag:

    
    
      {panel}
      Content
      {panel} <- Close tag!
    

WTF? The same goes for tables:

    
    
      ||Header||Header||
      |Cel1|Cell|
      |Cell|Cell|
    

Terrible design for any markup language. Of course, we're talking about the
same software that doesn't have templating (unless you count dumping form
values into a fully editable page), doesn't support customization (yes, I've
repeatedly been told this by customer service), doesn't support a custom
homepage, or damn near anything else.

I can work with Confluence pretty well now, but I'm still bitter we chose it
ata my job over something more flexible like MediaWiki.

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jwilliams
Yeah - it is pretty flakey.

Part of the power is all the macros you can put in, but it becomes so complex
that it approaches cranking out HTML...

So the confluence wiki quickly got full of these complex pages that only the
author could edit without breaking - sort of went against the point of a wiki.

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brlewis
I would have liked a use comparison, not just a setup comparison.

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lkozma
But these have to be embedded by the webmasters, why doesn't someone make a
rich text editor plugin for firefox, which would transform a regular textbox
on any website to a decent editor (emacs, vim, etc.)

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jonknee
<http://vimperator.mozdev.org/>

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tocomment
I made this guy <http://utilitymill.com/utility/HTML_Tag_Matcher_andor_fixer>
to fix the crap tinyMCE in WordPress puts out. How can it manage to not match
its divs anyway?

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pasbesoin
Several additional products mentioned in the comments. In particular, this
commentor points to a separate review he wrote that addresses some different
products:

[http://bulletproofbox.com/web-based-rich-text-editors-
compar...](http://bulletproofbox.com/web-based-rich-text-editors-
compared/#comment-191)

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martythemaniak
This is quite useful, as I'm building a custom CMS for my company right now. I
thought we'd go with a heavily restricted tinyMCE,but it looks like WidgEditor
is more along the lines of what I need. Small, light, and with just the right
amount of features.

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andreyf
How about web based rich IDE's? :)

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jkneib
How about leaving text as it is and add some useful features?

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PieSquared
How about leaving the web as it is and not trying to make it do things it
shouldn't and doesn't need to?

