[WEB4LIB] RE: xhtml compliant WYSIWYG editor

[Jeph Remley]

I forgot to mention that part of our requirements when building our CMS 
was the WYSIWYG editor actually needed the option to turn off HTML 
editing - we didn't want our content providers to touch the HTML. 
Nothing against them, but some of them had worked on our former static 
site, and knew just enough HTML to be dangerous.

Our intentions with our new site were to have more of a lockdown on what 
they could and couldn't do - we kept reminding them that professional 
sites such as cnn.com, msn.com, etc all have a very 
consistent/persistent look and feel across the site.  It's hard to have 
this sort of atmosphere when staff want to change the color of the 
header text on their pages to "something more attention getting" or 
"cooler looking", or decided all of the content on their pages should be 
centered rather than left aligned.  While some still find ways around 
our attempts to lock it all down, getting WYSIWYG editors that let you 
shut off features (no table insertion, only one color other than black 
for font colors, no access to the HTML code, etc) certainly helped.  We 
still love our content providers, but we also needed to..."guide" them 
into our more unified look.

One problem we've had is that the editors we offer our staff DON'T 
exactly display their content as it's going to be on the public site. 
If they can be set to display our CSS within the WYSIWYG editor, I'm 
unaware of how to do it....it'd certainly be welcome!  So we just have 
to apologize to our content providers, reminding them that they're just 
using the interface to put content into the pages - content more than 
style - and to trust the system we've built for them to take care of the 
overall look.

Seeing how the initial thrill of creating web pages from scratch wore 
out after several years with the old static site (with pages created in 
Dreamweaver), we found most were willing to give up the need to think 
about the look of their pages - just enter in sections of text and let 
our CSS take care of the rest.

We learned quite a bit in the process of building our CMS - I sometimes 
wish we could do it all over again so it was tidier, more efficient, 
didn't include some odd patches, etc, but man, that'd be CRAZY to do it 
all over again!  ;-)

Jeph

Leslie Hassett wrote:
> Thank you Jeph, this is exactly our situation. I will try the editors you
> suggest.
> 
> BTW, You are correct, << we are... " not looking for a Contribute or
> Dreamweaver type solution - you're actually looking for an application that
> can be incorporated into the code of your CMS?">>
> 
> Thanks again. And, again, my appreciation for this list!
> Leslie
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: web4lib at webjunction.org [mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org]
> On Behalf Of Jeph Remley
> Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2005 9:46 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list
> Subject: [WEB4LIB] RE: xhtml compliant WYSIWYG editor
> 
> Here at Kent State University Libraries & Media Services, we also built 
> a CMS using PHP, and first added in Editize (http://www.editize.com/) as 
> our WYSIWYG editor.  Over time we had Java problems, with the editor 
> crashing for some of our content providers, locking up, etc...  Updating 
> the JRE for staff members etc didn't always result in reliable fixes, so 
> we decided to try another editor - DevEdit (http://www.editlet.com/). 
> That editor seems to work ok, and I believe cranks out cleaner code (I 
> haven't looked at the resulting code lately - I don't recall how clean 
> it is), and seems more reliable.
> 
> We've actually given our content providers the option to choose between 
> editors - they can set this along with other preferences as part of the CMS.
> 
> The two editors DO have their differences - how they render/develope 
> unordered/ordered lists (especially when indenting embedded/sub-lists!), 
> options when building a table (which, for the most part, we've blocked 
> from the WYSIWYG options so our users can't use tables for layout 
> purposes), etc.  If I remember right, Editize generated less-clean code 
> than DevEdit.
> 
> We've also considered Editlet (http://www.editlet.com/), but realized we 
> couldn't easily install a trial copy here for testing without more 
> trouble than it may be worth at the moment.
> 
>  From the sounds of your msg, you're not looking for a Contribute or 
> Dreamweaver type solution - you're actually looking for an application 
> that can be incorporated into the code of your CMS?  (FWIW, I've notice 
> some of the code generated by Contribute in our intranet pages isn't 
> very clean either....was sort of surprise!)
> 
> Jeph Remley
> Multimedia/Web Developer
> Kent State University
> Libraries & Media Services
> Systems Dept
> 330 672 3090
> jremley at lms.kent.edu
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Wayne Graham wrote:
> 
>>If there's money in the budget, Contribute 3 is also a good product to
>>use... 
>>
>>Wayne
>>
>>========================
>>http://support.swem.wm.edu/wayne/blog 
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: web4lib at webjunction.org [mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org]
>>On Behalf Of Leslie Hassett
>>Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2005 12:19 PM
>>To: Multiple recipients of list
>>Subject: [WEB4LIB] RE: xhtml compliant WYSIWYG editor
>>
>>I have dreamweaver and am making sure I do that for the library pages but
>>the other campus contributors do not have it and they must rely on the
>>editor provided in the CMS.  Too bad!
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: web4lib at webjunction.org [mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org]
>>On Behalf Of Pons, Lisa (ponslm)
>>Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2005 9:09 AM
>>To: Multiple recipients of list
>>Subject: [WEB4LIB] RE: xhtml compliant WYSIWYG editor
>>
>>Excellent to be concerned: compliant code will only help you in the long
>>run.
>>
>>
>>Dreamweaver MX '04 will produce compliant code, but you have to set it up
> 
> to
> 
>>do so.
>>
>>Lisa
>>
>>Lisa Pons-Haitz
>>
>>Webmaster
>>University Libraries
>>University of Cincinnati
>>lisa.pons at uc.edu
>>(513)556-1431
>>
>>
>>
>>>-----Original Message-----
>>>From: Leslie Hassett [mailto:lhassett at dwebb.llu.edu]
>>>Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2005 11:50 AM
>>>To: Multiple recipients of list
>>>Subject: [WEB4LIB] xhtml compliant WYSIWYG editor
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>First, let me say I appreciate this list and all the expertise 
>>>represented here.
>>>
>>>I'm wondering if anyone knows of a "bug free" WYSIWYG editor that 
>>>creates xhtml compliant code which could be integrated into a 
>>>"homegrown" CMS. The CMS was created by our campus IT department and 
>>>uses php. We are going thru a website redesign that is using 
>>>stylesheets and xhtml 1.0 transitional (so we say!)
>>>
>>>I'm concerned that WYSIWYG editor currently in the CMS (purchased
>>>separately) allows non-compliant code, for example creating font tags, 
>>>even placing those font tags inside a header tag.  It's not clear to 
>>>me whether the CMS itself will be able to clean this up. If it 
>>>doesn't, our documents will not be what we say they are in the 
>>>declaration statement which is:
>>>
>>>
>>><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
>>>"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
>>><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>I am a reference librarian on the outside of this development process, 
>>>although I am one of the primary content editors and am one of the 
>>>first users of the CMS.  I try to keep current on HTML/XHTML/XML 
>>>issues, however, I still consider myself mostly a novice.  Normally, I 
>>>only lurk on this list to listen to what the real experts discuss but 
>>>I'd really like to suggest to our IT department an XHTML WYSIWYG 
>>>editor to make sure our pages have compliant code.  Department 
>>>secretaries and other staff who have no HTML knowledge will be using 
>>>this to enter their pages in the CMS.
>>>
>>>If anyone can help with this I'd appreciate it.  
>>>
>>>Thank you.
>>>
>>>Leslie Hassett, Reference Librarian
>>>lhassett at dwebb.llu.edu
>>>(909)558-4300 ext. 47513
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>>
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