making text-editing easy for children

Thanks for your reply.

FCKeditor doesn't work with opera (my browser of choice), so I've always been suspicious of its cross-browser capability. I know about all the available editors, and have researched and tried them.

I'd like not to have to use a wysiwyg, and instead use something like BUEditor.
In fact I saw a nice hack to the BUEditor image button which allowed you to float images - perfect!
But I have reservations about the children and staff being able to use these 'source editors'.
Or maybe I'm underestimating their ability (actually it's more the teachers that I'm worried about).

Thanks for any further advice about which editors have been used successfully in a school setting.

We used to use TinyMCE exclusively, but switched over to FCKeditor.

Our reasons:

1. FCKeditor works in Safari.

2. A string of annoying javascript issues that disappeared when we switched to FCK.

3. More granular show/hide functionality via the UI using FCKeditor.

The one advantage of Tiny over FCK is the ability to customize the toolbar via the UI -- aside from that, we have found FCK much cleaner and easier -- and we had been using Tiny exclusively for two years prior to switching.

RE: "Typically we only give students bold, italic, underline, left/right/center justification, bulleted lists (numbered and not numbered), indent/outdent, undo/redo, and spellcheck" -- this is very lose to one of FCKeditor's default configs, which includes all but the spellcheck.

Cheers,

Bill

FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers

Thanks for the replies.

It isn't a WYSIWIG editor, but I have had better luck with bueditor + IMCE for uploading images to content.
I used to use TinyMCE, but had many problems with it, including lack of Safari support.

I agree that BUEditor (with the 'float image' hack I mentioned) and imce look like a great combination.

But how do you find the children and teachers respond to dealing directly with the html or bbcode source?
Do they find it a hindrance, and perhaps complain about it, or do they enjoy learning how to use it?

Also, is it easy to make buttons for BUEditor which allow insertion of youtube videos and flash?

Thanks.

_{Regarding FCK, until it works on opera, it is a no-go.
Apparently it partially works on the new 9.5, but with many bugs that both parties are currently trying to fix.}

Hello anti,
I'm not sure of your age ranges, your situation or the functionality you are working towards... But you can make the back end of Drupal much more user friendly- by changing the uploading process, and making custom pages for content creation. For example, hide the default 'create content' menu, and create your own block using images or text which make sense to your users.

One model I really like is like Tumblr. I have attached a screenshot of their "add content" menu. They also have no WYSIWYG editor- just plain old text boxes. I'd recommend logging in, and giving it a go. It's a very simple blog format where text and media are treated like independent objects. Handling the content independently means you can also easily create image galleries and video feeds.

Right now, we have a journal where the kids select whether they are uploading an image (with a caption) or a video (with a caption) or just plain text. In some classrooms, the kids were working in small groups, and in one the teacher had the entire class looking at a screen projector collaborating together. But we intend the next iteration to allow for individual children (ages ranged from 7-14) to upload content by themselves or in pairs- so we are going to use icons on the menu, and generally simplify the process.

NOTE: Using IMCE for image handling might cause you trouble when upgrading. If it is possible, maybe you can find a way to have image and video support, without having freestyle in-line images? Maybe in your situation, you can get away with images and captions? For example, you can include an imagefield in a CCK content type, and you can control what it looks like, how its resized and where it appears.

You can also make the text wrap around your imagefield content, so it will look as you want it to (I think).