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

Safari 3, now for Mac and PC, recently came out in beta form. Included in this release was the ability for users to use visual editors also know as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors. No longer do Safari users have to know code to make basic formatting in blog posts.

Safari 3.0.1 Beta on Windows XP

I’ve tested it in Wordpress 2.2 and it works great.* As far as I understand, previous versions of Wordpress don’t support Safari’s rich text editing. Testing it out under 2.0.10 confirms this.

I also tested out Blogger and had no issues. They seem to be on board with the Safari 3 crowd too.

TypePad however didn’t seem to support rich text editing with Safari yet.

With Safari 3 being so new, and brand new to the Windows world, blog software creators are working in Safari support as they feel the need.

If you use TypePad, or other software that doesn’t support Safari’s rich text editing yet, drop and email to their support so they know your interested.

One of the things that bugs me about Wordpress is this WYSIWYG editor. It’s nice, but it has a tendency to eat your code. However, I found out a few cool features.

Did you know that you can put in basic HTML code into the WYSIWYG editor and it’ll render out as HTML when you hit save or publish? You can put in bold, italic, span, link and image HTML tags all in the WYSIWYG editor. Have an image on Flickr you want to post? Put the entire raw code that Flickr gives you into the editor, and it’ll be converted into a pretty image when you post it. That’s quite handy when you don’t feel like toggling back and forth between the HTML window.

This does not work as nice though with services like YouTube that offer Flash elements. Embedding Flash is a bit more tricky. I’ve found it best to use Safari or a browser that doesn’t do the whole WYSIWYG thing. Then putting in the YouTube code works fine.

I know it sounds odd, but Macromedia Adobe recently announced Contribute 4 and one of the key features is blogging. Contribute as desktop publishing software? Yep.

According to Contribute’s website, the application now supports MetaWeblog which means it should work with Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type and many others.

At first thought, Contribute doesn’t seem like your average blogging application and that’s because it isn’t. Contribute has worked its way into many workplaces as WYSIWYG website editing software. It was a great solution for those that wanted to edit their website, yet steer clear of the technical aspect of a website.

It’s that pre-built user base that makes integrating blogging capability the perfect next step. Teaching clients how to blog can be a challenge. There is a new interface, a new login/admin area and a whole new system to learn. With Contribute, that learning curve is lessened as they already know how to use the software and may already be comfortable using it.

It took me by surprise at first but adding blogging capabilities to Contribute seems to be then ext logical step. Not only are we installing more and more blogs for clients, but we also already use Contribute to let clients control their own content. This is just the next logical step in Contribute’s evolution.