Setting up a WYSIWYG editor for Drupal site users

Question

Looking through the Drupal contrib modules, and after a few Google searches, it becomes evident that there are any number of choices and combos available to set up a WYSIWYG editor in Drupal. I'm hoping that I can do this as simply and quickly and painlessly as possible, and not have to keep trying out different combos till one actually works right.

Here's what I need:

1. A basic WYSIWYG editor for the "filtered" input type only.
2. It doesn't need to have image-insert necessarily, though that might be nice later on...
3. Simple to set up and maintain.
4. Needs to work for Content-Profiles, Blog, Forum-post, and a few custom content types.

Answer 1

Try this module: http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg

Answer 2

Check out the wysiwyg (http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg) module.. it lets you install and try out a range of different editors, and you can associate different editors to different input types.

Personally, I've found fckeditor a good choice for allowing editors to author content - but I think the final choice is down to personal preference. By using the wysiwyg module you can demo a range.

Answer 3

Thanks for the http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg recommendation. But this thing is just about what I expected. A million configuration choices, and not one of them working right yet. I've already spent 2 hours on it, and have tried: FCKeditor YUI markItUp NicEdit

Setting up YUI from the wysiwyg config page didn't work. When I downloaded the 2 YUI modules and installed, they work, but not with wysiwyg module, and they broke my content profiles when I uninstalled them. So far the only one that actually seems to work is the ugly FCKeditor.

So yes, it's just the time-eater I was expecting and hoping against.

EDIT: Looks like wysiwyg/tinyMCE combo is the ticket. Works and looks okay. Thanks for all the info!

Answer 4

I use the WYSIWYG module - be sure to follow the directions closely. FCKEditor and TinyMCE work with it nicely, some of the others one are not working well.

UPDATE - April, 2010 -

Use the CKEDITOR module, very easy. http://drupal.org/project/ckeditor - still alot of choices though.

Answer 5

I totally agree with the people who suggested you to use the WYSIWYG module, but I would like to qualify my answer by briefly explaining the context of the birth of that module.

Drupal - for as much as I love it - has historically sucked at managing any kind of content that is not plain text. Until version 5 came out it was a real pain to handle formatting, not to speak about images. While in the same years WordPress already had an excellent editor shipping with the default installation and Joomla! (Mambo Server, at the time!) was doing pretty well too.

Things greatly improved with D5 and D6 but efforts where put by developers in very different directions, maximising the investment of manpower and minimising the return, each module seriously lacking in different areas. At some point, a certain consensus developed on the idea of creating a standard, pluggable architecture for WYSIWYG in Drupal, possibly to be implemented in the core. A sort of API as they already exist for forms, database, messaging, mailing and pretty much every other core functionality of Drupal.

The WYSIWYG module is the fruit of that effort: that is the module that defines the API which are going to be implemented in the Drupal core.

In other words: the WYSIWYG module is not only the best existing module for what you want to do, but it is also the only one that most probably will be ever ported to D7 and following releases: if you learn how to handle it, you will have peace of mind for a few years to come, and you will have an ever-increasing choice of supported editors.

So I invite you not to give up despite the complexities of the setup. Stack Overflow and the Drupal IRC channels are excellent places to find support if you get stuck.

HTH, best of luck! :)

Answer 6

Hi Michael.

To sit along side the wysiwyg module, I also make use of a module called better formats

This modules allows you to further refine which input filter to use by default for each node type. I thought that alone was spot on but, you can also set up per node, which users roles get allocated which filter type.

This means on your blog pages, trusted users can have full html access (which will bring up the wysisywg - on my config) whilst other users just get a bog standard text box.

Once installed, all the options for it can be found in each node type's edit screen.

I make great use of it on my mini community portal for a little town in the UK, Tunstall

Answer 7

I had tested several Editors WYSIWIG before and now I can recommend you the FCKeditor with no problem.

Here a how to install video

Here a good user guide