Site Renovation Day

Spent most of the day working on Foliopress WYSIWYG together with Peter Baran.

Our solution for the WordPress WYSIWYG and image handling nightmare is coming along quite brilliantly well. This is what the basic toolbar looks like.

Foliopress WYSIWYG toolbar preview

Foliopress WYSIWYG offers true What You See is What You Get Editing for WordPress.

• It is backwards compatible with legacy code (hello Xstandard/TinyMCE)
• It doesn’t break complex forms (hello TinyMCE/Xstandard)
• It doesn’t discard whole posts (hello Xstandard)
• It doesn’t go haywire and create more and more nested P tags (hello WYSIWYG Pro)
• It doesn’t look like hell in the WordPress interface (hello normal FCK)
• It doesn’t make uploading images a never ending and hopeless struggle (hello WordPress uploader)
• It doesn’t make your clients hopping mad and lead them to breaking everything (Plaintext/RAW html)
• Your drafts look like exactly like your posts will, without having to waste time with a preview function (hello Xstandard)
• You have unlimited standard undo from the keyboard (hello Xstandard)
• Very easy to configure (including site WYSIWYG) (hello Xstandard, TinyMCE, FCK)

In short, Foliopress WYSIWYG is what you always wished the WordPress Editor would do. I’m using it now and can’t believe no one created and editor like this earlier.

I’m waiting for John to get back off holiday so I can put it up for downloading (we must do a custom implementation of his excellent WordPress download manager Drainhole). We plan to release Foliopress WYSIWYG and Foliopress SEO Images under the Creative Commons strictest license: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported. What does that mean?

Basically anybody is free to use Foliopress WYSIWYG for non-profit websites. We encourage and support creativity and personal expression in all forms. But for commercial websites there will be a small charge, likely with a per site license. Why should someone running two small commercial sites pay the same as someone running 300 commercial weblogs?

Currently the only WSYIWYG editor which actually works on WordPress belongs to the Semiologic pack and costs $25 for a personal license. It’s a very good deal, but Foliopress WYSIWYG editor is much, much better (sorry Dennis). Specifically, Foliopress WYSIWYG is better looking, has more complete and easier to use options, offers true WYSIWYG editing and handles images at a totally different level.

You will save yourself a ton of time by using Foliopress WYSIWYG. And frustration. Money is good. Less frustration – on the web – is even better. You wil write more posts and enjoy the writing more.

The best complete freebie out there for commercial use is Dean’s FCK Editor for WordPress. There’s nothing wrong with Dean’s WYSIWYG editor (and lots good, including a rich options panel) but it’s not very good looking and pretty clunky. We sent Dean some core code which would make his editor compatible with our SEO Images plugin for FCK. Unfortunately we didn’t hear back from him. He’s probably swamped in mail (so am I Dean, if you must know).

In the meantime, there’s a lot to clean up on this site. I got to some of it:

• The long missing breadcrumbs so that people could navigate up in the tools seciton.
• The few downloads which weren’t working (misconfigured Drainhole).
• The shrinking deep menu in the static pages section.
• Documentation and screenshots for the Mambo Embedded Menus plugin.

Merry Christmas! A working WordPress Editor. A few days late, but it’s been 2000 years coming.

Alec Kinnear

Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.