WYSIWYG Editor Observations and Needs

These notes provide some observations on the use of the current (July 2009) Tiki WYSIWYG Editor (FCKEditor) in Tiki 3.0 and document some identified issues/additional requirements that would improve its usability and usage consistency.

The context for these notes is the deployment of a new site where the wide range of Tiki CMS/Groupware features will provide the users with a major ‘upgrade’ to their existing web presence, in order to enable collaboration and support to an extensive worldwide user base. This new Tiki deployment replaces an existing proprietary CMS (porting 550+ existing web pages) and the use of a WYSIWYG editor was mandatory for the content management and administration team since they are not IT experts and had become accustomed to wysiwyg editing, so Wiki editing was just ‘too alien’ for them to accept. The goal however has been to make the WYSIWYG editor the default main editor for all users – but to allow ‘die hards’ to still use the normal (wiki) editor.

WYSIWYG configurations.

This section documents how the use of the WYSIWYG editor has been configured (which may not be right / optimal !!)

In Tiki admin, WYSIWYG is configured as follows:

The specifics of which toolbar buttons have been allowed will be discussed later.

In Tiki Text area admin – the Wiki syntax settings are:

This combination seems to be the way to get the wysiwyg editor to show line feeds properly BUT pages edited with the normal editor then require html br tags to be added to get correct line feeds. This is obviously not convenient – is there another way? so that normal and WYSIWYG editors can co-exist?

Using the WYSIWYG editor

The following lists some anomalies/quirky behaviours/possible bugs that have been found – some of these could of course be due to incorrect/poor configuration.

In no particular order:

1. If regex search and import page are configured, they do not work in the WYSIWYG editor.
   • Have subsequently found that the non-working Import page is a general bug in 3.x and doesn’t work in the normal editor either
   • A modified tiki-editpage.tpl has been used as a patch in the deployment so that neither of these functions are shown in the WYSIWYG editor
2. Various buttons in the WYSIWYG toolbar have been removed by deleting these options in the WYSIWYG admin screen:
   • The flash button in the WYSIWYG toolbar does not seem to work properly so this button has been removed. Is this a config error?
   • The templates button has been removed so that the Tiki “Content template” can be used consistently. Would like to explore the use of this button (albeit re-labelled) to insert plugins as has been documented
   • The print button has been removed so that the Tiki print functions can be used consistently.
   • The spellcheck button has been removed – only because I haven’t figured out yet how to load the dictionaries etc. I had thought that the Firefox dictionary would work (as it does in the normal editor) but for some reason it doesn’t work within the WYSIWYG editor frame. Is there any documentation for setting up dictionaries etc.?
3. The Content template functionality did not work consistently when the WYSIWYG editor is the default, e.g. using Preview toggled it back to the normal editor. An initial set of changes have already been made to tiki-admin_content_templates.tpl and these have been committed to trunk (rev. 19838). Whilst this MOD is a good improvement of the original version, more changes are needed e.g. to add another field to the db to flag which templates are ‘wysiwyg’ instead of ‘normal’ just like wiki pages – so that a Content template is always opened in the editor that was last used for it. It is expected that some refactoring will be possible – especially if the use of the WYSIWYG editor is made an option in other Features e.g. Blogs, Calendars etc.
4. In “Text area” admin the “Use File Galleries to store pictures” option has been set which then automatically opens the File Gallery functionality when Image insertion is invoked in the editor. – which works well, but:
   • Whilst the FCKeditor creates HTML for the resultant image this is converted back to Wiki format which has the unfortunate consequence that the Border, HSpace and VSpace parameters are lost as soon as the page is inserted. To mask this problem in the deployment these fields have been relabelled as “not used” by editing the en-uk.js and en.js language files (couldn’t find another way to do this).
   • As part of the web site content ‘porting’ process the existing pages (in a mixture of HTML and proprietary formats for images and link references) have been extracted from the existing proprietary database. To avoid changing all the images/file download references the existing web page resources have been uploaded into exactly the same folders in the tiki web space so that all image references are automatically resolved
   • BUT editing these images i.e. to add an alt tag or to modify width/height, the URL details can get corrupted (ie FCKeditor gets a bit confused!)
5. It would be very useful if more flexibility were possible with image sources i.e.
   • Even if “Use File Galleries to store pictures” is specified it becomes the preferred option and access to the file space is still an available option
6. Inserting Links has one notable omission in its options. As well as URL, Link to anchor in the text, and E-mail, it would be very useful to have a file download option that opens and allows selection of a file from a File Gallery, just like image selection from File Galleries
7. The Maximise option is NOT particularly useful since editing in full screen mode gives a false impression of what a page will look like from a pagination point of view. Instead it would be much more preferable to be able to expand the screen in just the same way as the normal editor i.e. to have and controls.

Configuring the WYSIWYG editor

It is not clear how the baseline configuration for the FCKeditor can be modified.

For example the font set is available from a drop down menu, but where are these options set?

All the main FCKeditor settings seem to be specified in: /lib/fckeditor/fckconfig.js

But making changes to this file does not seem to make any difference. Is there a tiki-specific copy of this file that is used?

There seem to be some Tiki specific config files in /lib/ fckeditor_tiki/, but there does not seem to be anything, for example, to change font choices.

Also, very oddly, whilst under the /tikilink/ folder there are configs for the special “insert Tiki link” control, including a fck_tikilink.tpl file, the similar set of files under the /tikiimage/ folder just repeats the fck_tikilink.tpl file and the fck_tikiimage.tpl file referenced in fck_tikiimage.php does not seem to be anywhere?

eromneg - July 2009