Jan 27, 2008
New Text Editor for WordPress – FCKEditor
If you use WordPress a lot like I do, you’ve no doubt noticed the shortcomings of TinyMCE, the default WYSIWYG text editor for writing posts and pages. I’ve looked into replacing it in the past, but never came up with a viable option that didn’t cost a bunch of money or that wasn’t a headache to manage.
Today in my web travels (researching how to write a Webservice with PHP) I came across FCKEditor, a free text editor that seems to have a lot more going for it that TinyMCE. I began to look into how I could incorporate it with WordPress when it hit me – DUH, someone has likely already done this work. So, I googled FCKEditor and WordPress and sure enough, a kind gentleman by the name of Dean has made a plugin to marry the two together.
It’s as simple as downloading his plugin and activating it. Within 2 minutes, I was writing this message to let everyone know the good news.
So far, FCKEditor seems to be exactly what I wanted – more power over my WordPress posts with less hassle to do it. It’s what I was hoping for with Contribute CS3, but I’ve already let you know how that went.
Here’s a quick screenshot of it:
In fact, it has it’s own image upload manager, which is really great. I used it to put up that image and it went so much smoother than it would have been otherwise – between using the WordPress option or FTPing it myself and copying the URL, getting the capitlization correct, etc.
So, two thumbs 
for now. I’ll let you know more as I discover it!
UPDATE:
Here is a picture of the full editor – just so you can see that it isn’t as "limited" as the pic above suggests…
So did you install in on my blog Mr. Webmaster? Nooooooooooooooooooo!
Actually it looks like it’s missing some of the cool things I use on the other one though like the Flash plugin and the text color and also the view html manager. Is this in addition to what’s already there or in place of?
The full do-hickey is much bigger than that – in fact, it won’t fit on the blog at full size. I’ll shrink a pic and let you see it…
And, OF COURSE I’m going to put it on your blog, but not before I TEST it first!
To be fair to TinyMCE, it supports a lot more options than the default configuration provided by WordPress. WordPress has just really dumbed it down to make their software simpler to use for beginners. I found the following blog post about extending TinyMCE in WordPress which you may find useful: http://www.mkbergman.com/?p=275. You can get more info about the editor itself here: http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/
TinyMCE is crap and I have a lot of difficulty with it and formatting. Hopefully this will solve some of these problems. Thanks!
I’ve been using Dean’s plugin for a few days now and really like it over TinyMCE w/ the Advanced TinyMCE plugin.
What I really need is a WYSIWYG text widget, preferable an FCKEditor now that I’ve used it. I’ve been using the WYSIWYG Text Widget for years but now its obsolete. The Rich Text Widget supposedly FCK, is very limited. Others I’ve been trying don’t work. Any suggestions?
Hi Chuck!
Thanks for dropping a line. Not sure I understand what you are trying to do? What is the text widget supposed to do? How are you trying to use it?
Cheers,
A
Hi, thanks Andrew. Bottom line is I want a WYSIWYG Editor in the text widget. My users are not much for copy/pasting or editing code in the text widget. I’ve been using the WYSIWYG Text Widget but it doesn’t work after WP 2.7.
Chuck
Oh! Yeah, duh. I gotcha. Hmm… That’s an interesting idea. Hadn’t thought about that yet.
Hey
This is a bit late, but I was wondering if FCKEditor deals with whitespace better than TinyMCE and its extensions.
I’ve installed Advanced TinyMCE, which works very well except it doesn’t fix the “wordpress eats your whitespace” problem in 3.0.
Thoughts?
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