FCKeditor – A Feature Packed WYSIWYG Wordpress Plugin
Being a designer/developer, I’m very handy at coding and designing all my own posts. Need the text red? No problem. Need other fun formatting? Not an issue. However, not everyone is quite as handy with code as I am. I’ve had many clients ask for additional formatting options when writing blog posts. Wordpress has come a long way in adding more formatting options, but there are quite a few people out there that want it all.
Having tested a handful of WYSIWYG plugins for Wordpress, the best one I’ve come across so far is FCKeditor. FCKeditor replaces Wordpress’ current editor with one that has a lot of additional features. To make it even better, it even writes pretty clean code.
Additional features, besides those found in Wordpress, include:
- Font face, sizes and colors.
- Its own built in image uploader along side of Wordpress’.
- Flash capabilities.
- Post Templates.
- Paste from Word & Paste plain text buttons.
- Find and Replace
- Forms
- Subscript and Superscript text.
- Link Anchors
- Custom Smilies
- Special Characters
- Page Break
- Custom Styles
- Tables
- & More
Another great feature is the full screen editor. Hit the button and your whole browser window turns into the editor for maximum screen writing space. I think I’m going to keep it installed just for this feature.
The only downsides I currently see is that it will show both the FCKeditor and the Wordpress editor when writing a post. I think it’s a minor bug and doesn’t seem to bother anything. After further investigation, I only see this on my home machine, not on my work machine. Odd.
It also doesn’t interface with other plugins like CForum or Polls. If you manually put in the code that is needed, it still works, but the buttons don’t show up in the editor.
If you feel the need to add in more formatting to your posts, grab the FCKeditor and give it a go. It may be just what you’re looking for.
I’m still looking for the best WYSIWYG plugin though. I have checked out a few others including xinha4wp which was nice, but isn’t up-to-date for Worpress 2.3 yet and wysiwygpro looked sweet, but was $54.
I can’t say that I’m 100% satisfied with any WYSIWYG plugins yet. FCKeditor is by far the most feature packed and user friendly one I’ve come across though. Have you found any good ones?
Categories: BloggerDesign, Commentary, Plugins, WordPress
Tags FCKeditor, wysiwyg, xinha4wp
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007
I have to say I love the FCKeditor, I’ve used it on a few sites of mine, but for Wordpress I’m still a fan on the tinyMCE editor as it supports Opera
I also prefer TinyMCE over FCKeditor. I disagree that FCKeditor creates clean code. Font face is not clean code, in my opinion. However, neither are inline styles, which TinyMCE creates if you have that enabled, but at least they are standards compliant.
The biggest problem I have with all of these editors is that they suck at formatting paragraphs. No matter what I’ve done the wysiwyg editors don’t know how to place a page break or a paragraph tag or anything else.
The biggest advantage I see of FCKeditor is that you can include page breaks.
I was looking for a WYSIWYG editor for WordPress and came across this blog. I would like to know if the WYSIWYGPro works with WordPress 2.6 version and if an amateur poster can use it to make posts?
Thanks
Have you used FCKeditor recently? I am testing on WP 2.7.1 Firefox 3.0.6 Mac OS 10.5.6 Latest version of Flash (does this use flash?). I have disabled everything but Akismet, and the editor does not show-up I just get a blank box.
Hi Luke
I have one blog using the FCKeditor and it’s running Wordpress 2.7 and it seems to be working fine. Ensure that the WYSIWYG editor is turned off and check for updates to the FCKeditor.