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Cool Tools

Cobolhacker recently told me about a very cool Javacript-based open source editor for CMS called TinyMCE. I'm using it now to edit this story! It is pretty slick and could be huge for some of the projects I'm working on that require a CMS.

Not only is is pretty much WYSYWIG but gives you a real-time view of what your story looks like and there's a pop-up preview window as well, in case that's not good enough. AND there's a "save" button that submits the form just in case you missed the big "UPDATE" button I put at the bottom of it. And if you wanted to write the code you could use AJAX to save your work without leaving the page. (It took me a LOOONG while, but I did finally figure that piece out... but unfortunately it doesn't seem to want to work on this webserver!)

Basically if you are using PHP/MySQL-based CMS you just pull your story out of the database like you normally would, and stick it in a textarea in a form on a page that is linked to the tinyMCE javascript. If you wanted to get fancy you could read a section of code out of an existing page and write it back in again when you save. That part would require you to write your own code in ASP or PHP or PERL, but that's up to you. (And I would think that option is less secure but whatever.)

The javacript code automagically converts any textarea in your form to an edit box with a full range of buttons and tools, also fully configurable. Don't want your users adding font tags, layers and so forth? Just take out the appropriate controls and away you go.

Paragraphs, headings, bullets, etc. are all at my disposal and I can specify using the stylesheet I've already created for the site - and there's support for creating custom style attributes. How cool is that? There's supposed to be a spell checker for it (the Firefox Greasemonkey one is not supported for some reason) but if you use IE it supports IEspell which is a downloadable plugin for Internet Exploder. It'll also use GoogleSpell but you have to download a package to use with that and it's just a bit more work than I feel like doing just now.

There's even support for creating tables and layers but I won't want my users getting that fancy with it.

I have to build some stuff on the backend like an asset manager which apparently is pretty easy to integrate but it's pretty much ready to go as-is.

And it has UNDO. Heh.

Filed under General, Feb 29, 2008
 

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