Being a designer/developer, I’m very handy at coding and designing all my own posts. Need the text red? No problem. Need other fun formatting? Not an issue. However, not everyone is quite as handy with code as I am. I’ve had many clients ask for additional formatting options when writing blog posts. WordPress has come a long way in adding more formatting options, but there are quite a few people out there that want it all.
Having tested a handful of WYSIWYG plugins for WordPress, the best one I’ve come across so far is FCKeditor. FCKeditor replaces WordPress’ current editor with one that has a lot of additional features. To make it even better, it even writes pretty clean code.
Additional features, besides those found in WordPress, include:
- Font face, sizes and colors.
- Its own built in image uploader along side of WordPress’.
- Flash capabilities.
- Post Templates.
- Paste from Word & Paste plain text buttons.
- Find and Replace
- Forms
- Subscript and Superscript text.
- Link Anchors
- Custom Smilies
- Special Characters
- Page Break
- Custom Styles
- Tables
- & More
Another great feature is the full screen editor. Hit the button and your whole browser window turns into the editor for maximum screen writing space. I think I’m going to keep it installed just for this feature.
The only downsides I currently see is that it will show both the FCKeditor and the WordPress editor when writing a post. I think it’s a minor bug and doesn’t seem to bother anything. After further investigation, I only see this on my home machine, not on my work machine. Odd.
It also doesn’t interface with other plugins like CForum or Polls. If you manually put in the code that is needed, it still works, but the buttons don’t show up in the editor.
If you feel the need to add in more formatting to your posts, grab the FCKeditor and give it a go. It may be just what you’re looking for.
I’m still looking for the best WYSIWYG plugin though. I have checked out a few others including xinha4wp which was nice, but isn’t up-to-date for Worpress 2.3 yet and wysiwygpro looked sweet, but was $54.
I can’t say that I’m 100% satisfied with any WYSIWYG plugins yet. FCKeditor is by far the most feature packed and user friendly one I’ve come across though. Have you found any good ones?
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