Posted by DanW on January 17, 2008 at 5:40pm
As part of the GHOP contest, I've put a <a comparision of the WYSIWYG editors available for Drupal 5 in the handbook.
Let me know what you think :)
Dan
Drupal 5 WYSIWYG Comparision
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Great!
These results are really valuable for many Drupal users. Good job!
Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind
Daniel F. Kudwien
netzstrategen
Image integration
I'd love seeing something on how the different editors deal with image integration.
Hi, Thanks for making this
Hi,
Thanks for making this comparison :) This will be interesting for a lot of users.
As maintainer of the Whizzywig module, i have taken your comments into account:
- buttons are now added in the download package (see http://drupal.org/node/211111)
- I ran the coder.module and made sure module passes validation.
http://www.svendecabooter.be
Importance of "valid HTML" and "coder.module test"?
Thanks Dan! You did a GREAT job putting the comparison together!
What is the importance of "valid HTML"? Many of the editors on the comparison, including the popular TinyMCE, are listed as "Failed".
What is the importance of "coder.module test"? Many of the editors on the comparison, including the popular FCKeditor, are listed as "Fails".
Thanks in advance.
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
Importance of "valid HTML"
1: Dispaly Compatability;
A valid HTML site is more likely to render well on a wide range of browsers and devices.
2: Data Compatability;
Valid HTML is XML compliant and therefore is much more likely to be capable of full manipulation, xtraction, editing by all those 3 and 4 leter trendy XML toool names that we hear about such as XSLT, DOM etc.
Regards
John Bryan
www.ALT2.com
Regards
John Bryan
www.ALT2.com
Is one compatibility more important than the other?
Thanks John.
Is "valid HTML" more important than "coder.module.test", or vice versa?
Looking at the Comparision of Drupal 5 WYSIYG Editors, several editors passed "valid HTML" whereas only nicEdit passes "coder.module.test" (it didn't pass "valid HTML").
In a perfect world there would be a couple editors that pass both tests, but since none did, where should the emphasis be placed? What would you pick and why?
Thanks in advance!
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
The "valid HTML" test is
The "valid HTML" test is significantly more important to your end users, as this affects the HTML output on your website, like John Bryan mentioned.
The coder.module test basically just tests whether the module developer followed the Drupal coding standards. For an end user of the WYSIWYG editor this is of little importance. A module could be functioning totally great, but still fail the coder.module test if the module developer didn't follow all Drupal coding standards, which could be really tiny stuff, like forgetting to put a space after the 'if' keyword in your code, which doesn't change the functionality one bit, but can be a reason to fail the coder module test.
By the way, the Whizzywig module now also passes the coder.module test ;)
However i think it's more important to search for an editor that suits your needs and you find nice to work with, rather than just basing your judgment on the passing/failing of the coder module test.
http://www.svendecabooter.be
Then why does it seem TinyMCE is used more?
I guess I'm kind of wrapped up around the "valid HTML" results on the editor comparison.
I hear what you're saying about "valid HTML" and it being "significantly more important" to my end users, but if that's the case, why does it appear that many more folks (36 to 8 so far in this unscientific poll ;) ) are choosing TinyMCE ("failed" valid HTML) over FCKeditor ("passed" valid HTML)?
Why are these folks sacrificing "valid HTML" by using TinyMCE and what are they gaining over FCKeditor? Better features with TinyMCE? Easier installation with TinyMCE?
Could it be that the comparison test is already outdated (completed on or about 1/17/08) and that TinyMCE (Version 3.0 was released 1/30/08) now results in "valid HTML"?
Thanks!
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
I don't really know why
I don't really know why TinyMCE is the most popular editor around...
Maybe because the module that integrates TinyMCE into Drupal has a lot of options, so webmaster can really customise it.
I don't really tested if TinyMCE always produces valid HTML, but i use it frequently and didn't really notice it producing invalid HTML. I know there are some options to cleanup the HTML, so i think in most cases the HTML will be pretty valid. However i don't know what testing method was used in the comparison mentioned in this thread.
http://www.svendecabooter.be
Historical choice I suspect
I don't know about these days but in the past TinyMCE had several advantages over FCKEditor etc. It tends to be the first choice now because it was it was first choice in the past and so many other people use it now, why use a less well known tool when you already know one that seems to do the job.
That does not mean that FCKeditor is worse than TinyMCE now. In the past it had advantages over Tiny, such as more comprehensive control over which fields use it etc., and some of it's disadvantages may have disapeared, such as previously poor image adding facilities. With the current un-availability of Tiny on Drupal-6 a lot of people will be forced into trying FCKeditor right now so Tiny may become less of the default choice.
In the past I myself had tried both and whilst liking aspects of FCKeditor I had to use TinyMCE because of:-
Still trialling at the moment, but I can't confirm (so far) that any of those advantages exist anymore compared with FCKeditor.
Regards
John Bryan
www.ALT2.com
Regards
John Bryan
www.ALT2.com
..
.. ignore.. deleted
Regards
John Bryan
www.ALT2.com
While I can understand that
While I can understand that people might find this useful, I think that there's a number of serious problems with the comparison.
I've created a DROP task with the purpose of revising this by replacing it with a comparision table. It would be great to get some feedback on what should be tested.
Link to node
None of the editors seem to support picking Drupal nodes to link to. Rather disappointing...
Link to node
I would think this would be an easy mod to make. It would simply be a query to generate a list from the node_revisions table. It would be a fantastic addition to the linking process.
RE: Link to node
I'm about to start a project that might require this functionality. If the client insist and I implement it, I'll be more than happy to share the code...
Link to node
If you had searched for exactly this term, you would have found: Link to content, which already provides this functionality, at least for TinyMCE.
Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind
Daniel F. Kudwien
netzstrategen
It also works with FCKeditor
I've been working on adjusting this module (Link to content) also to FCKeditor, it can be tested here: http://drupal.fckeditor.net
Currently it works pretty well on Drupal 5.
AFAIK this module will be rewritten soon and there is a chance that it will be FCKeditor compatible.
It doesn't work out of the box right now, but as you may see the results are pretty good and the amount of things to change isn't very big:
http://drupal.fckeditor.net/linktocontent.patch
Detailed instruction is in readme.txt that is attached to FCKeditor dev module (5.x-2.x-dev).