A client asked me today for more control in their Wordpress control panel. Specifically, when posting they wanted to control the font sizes, colors and do a bit more. As a designer I always freak at that question as I think the code is going to be filled with massive amounts of font tags and out of order strong tags and ohhh the madness. But, then again, maybe I’m overreacting.

So, I did some researching and came up with one possible idea, Xinha4WP. It’s a Wordpress plugin that replaces the default text editor with a much more advanced version. It also needs the Text Control plugin to work so you need to install that too.

Xinha4WP gives bloggers many features including all font control (sizes and colors), tables, additional smilies, special characters and few more items. The coolest thing is the maximize button that lets you make the editor the size if your browser window.

The downside is that it is a rather large plugin weighing in at 5.5mb. It is also showing up above the built in Wordpress editor widow. This is not ideal to have two editor windows especially since the default Wordpress one is ignored. This could be a conflict with the video pugin they using too. Not sure.

I’ve been considering writing a post on desktop blogging, however a few other blogs are doing that as we speak and I don’t want to be repetitive.

I’ve tried Performancing and can’t say I was a big fan.  I still have to use my browser so I might as well log into my blog admin.  Flock is the same idea.  I have used Etco in the past and it’s amazing, however I haven’t spent the money for it.  I’ve tried Mars Edit which feels like a lacking Etco and I’ve tried Qumana; twice.

The last time I tried Qumana it sucked.  I’ll be honest.  It either didn’t work the blog platform I was using or what, but now that I’m running Wordpress, I’ll try it again.  People are talking good things about it so we’ll give it another go and it is free.

Give me a month or so and we’ll see if I revert back to Wordpress’ admin or not.

What do you recommend?  I’m on a Mac and should spring for Etco but I don’t really need it.

[tags]performancing,flock,etco,mars-edit,qumana[/tags]