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MothersClick.com, a social networking site for mother's, is looking for a user friendly yet fully functional and configurable WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") editor. So I spent a few days installing all available Drupal 5 WYSIWYG editors on my local machine. Each editor was setup on it's own fresh installation of Drupal 5.11. The default theme was Garland and then the top 3 editors wered later tested in a development environment for MothersClick.com.
There's a few aspects of each editor that were important during testing.
Development & Support
It's important to know that the code you're about to integrate into your website is well maintained and has very few bugs. Viewing all "Support Request" for a module is a good way to gauge this. A large amount of support request is not necessarily bad. It may be an indicator of the modules popularity. If support request have been acknowledge, repaired, and closed by the maintainer then this is a great sign.
Configuration
The ability to add and remove buttons from a WYSIWYG editor to expand or limit it's functionality is very important. The ability to display more functionality to specific user groups and the ability to determine which content types and textfields the editor will appear are both nice additions.
Usability
How simple is it for the end user to interact with the editor and how well the editor works in various browsers. Some editors even keep formatting when copy and pasting from editors like Microsoft Office.
Clean Output
What does the markup look like after submitting content. Overall, most WYSIWYG editors have gotten very good at this, but it wasn't too long ago that alot of unnecessary markup (paragraph breaks and span tags) were included in output.
Image Handling
It's best to have images stored on the local server, but many editors just use a URL reference. Better WYSIWYG editors will allow images to be uploaded and the best editors will allow image manipulation.
So, enough of the back story. Let's see which WYSIWYG editors get the job done best. I'll start with my least favorite and work my way up. Surprisingly enough, my personal favorite was not the one chosen for the production site. Complexity seems to be relevant to the person using the editor.
Nice reviews, thanks for taking the time.
And so which one did you go with for MothersClick.com ?
redDIRT Drupal Development
I have discovered that using Drupal for CMS on sites that the owner has limited skills is the perfect setup.
Too bad FCK Editor wasn't reviewed. Maybe because it's the most popular Drupal WYSIWYG?
good point, not sure how I overlooked that one.
I'll do a review as well as screenshot each editor and add it into these reviews.
It looks like you took a lot of time to arrange the article with all the floated textboxes and everything. But most of the actual content is just cut and paste from review to review. A bit more in depth critic would have been nice.
The most popular option is fckeditor
Excellent, this type of comparison hasn't been done for a long time. Consider copying it over to Drupal.org at some point for posterity. . .
Can't believe you didn't review FCKedtor, especially as Dries commented at the last Drupalcon that it's the current leader to get brought into core!
And you don't explain why you talk about Asset, especially given the answer is NONE??
Especially since Asset IS a great Image handling module, getting WYWSIWYG integration would be great - I'd actually advise using their inline tag rather than raw , makes things much more manageable - AFAIK none of the optoins you discuss even write to the files table, so how do you manage your file/node relationships?
Thanks for taking the time to review those editor integration modules!
However, you somehow missed to include Wysiwyg API, http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg, which will soon replace all of those modules and allow to use multiple, different editors in Drupal. In it's current stage, there is only support for TinyMCE 2 or 3, and basic support for FCKeditor 2.6. A patch to support jWysiwyg is in the queue.
Wysiwyg API will also allow all editors to integrate with Drupal modules like IMCE, Asset, Image Assist, or Inline.
Anyway, I think your post is another good resource to make further decisions on which editor to integrate/support next.
Thanks,
Daniel F. Kudwien (sun)
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