WYSIWYG

As designers, something that we all wish at one point or another is for non-technical users to be able to style their contributed content according to the styles we have defined in style sheets. Users usually want to be able to easily do this as well. If a WYSIWYG is involved it often means a user will be selecting colours and fonts that will end up inline with the element; hard coded in the HTML like <div style="{background-color='green'; font-size='2em';}" >.

The WYSIWYG module does a great job of centralizing and abstracting the use of various graphical editors in Drupal. Its relative newness means it is poorly and confusingly documented in some respects. I recently had to add the headings plugin for TinyMCE and ran into a lot of confusing information about how to make that happen.

The quicktags module provides a tinymce-button-style solution for formatting wiki posts. Quicktags adds buttons to the textarea and uses on-the-fly generated javascript. It is not a wysiwyg editor, but something far simpler: It simply inserts the basic code into your textarea.

Here is a screenshot of quicktags in action:

The following article is part of s series on Setting up a Drupal Site for Internationalization.