Jan 27, 2008

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…

FCKEditor, Wordpress, Wordpress Plug-in