Document Actions
Changing Your Content Editor
To change your content editor on Plone sites:
- Go to preferences on the top right bar and click on personal preferences.
- Scroll down to content editor and select editor. To use HTML or reStructured Text click on basic HTML textarea editor. You can also select WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors like Kupu and FCKEditor if they are installed. (Kupu comes by default with Plone 2.5)
1. Basic HTML textarea editor
This editor is compatible with all browsers, unlike WYSIWYG editors. With this editor you can choose between HTML and reStructured Text, via the drop-down menu just above the Body Text field. (In Plone default, you can choose Structured Text or Basic text too, however we're only going to concentrate on the first two)
ReStructured Text
This is definitely becoming our favourite way of adding content at vasudevaservice.com. It's very instinctive, and most importantly, provides an elegant way to effect CSS and XHTML separation. Read a very nice explanation in this blog entry....
Read this reStructured Text primer...
HTML
If you have access to Dreamweaver, and you dont care about validated code, then this is a good way to make complex pages. But make sure someone isn't going to use unconfigured Kupu because that will almost definitely mess up the page.
2. Kupu
Kupu is a very easy to use editor for no-frills pages. We've written a kupu guide...
However, be warned that it "strips" away HTML code that doesnt comply with the XHTML 1.0 standard. Kupu looks for tag attributes like "bgcolor" and "width" (for tables) and cuts them out when it is saving the HTML. It also will strip out most CSS styles by default. However this can all be changed - we've written a short how-to on configuring the Kupu stripping mechanism .
But if you don't want to delve into all this, and you are happy with very simple pages and the most basic of tables, Kupu is fine.
3. FCKeditor
FCK editor is quite extensive. It has many features, most of which you won't use. You can take HTML straight from Dreamweaver into FCK editor and it will keep it all without having to muck around with editor preferences.
However FCKEditor doesnt do paragraph format by default, you chace to change format from 'Normal' to 'Paragraph'. There are also links issues with FCKEditor...
General Notes:
On first apearances WYSIWYG editors are the way to go, however they can stifle creativity by distracting writers with appearance rather than content; read this blog entry....
We have actually uninstalled WYSIWYG editors on vasudevaservice.com.
Within Kupu or FCK if you see internal links with lots of numbers this means the UID (Unique ID) feature is enabled - a unique address is given to the page you can move the file anywhere in the site and there will be no broken links. However we recommend turning off this feature - search engines dont like it. Just go to the editor configuration and unclick " allow link objects by UID". UID seems to be default in FCKeditor, but not in Kupu.
If you press return in Kupu and you get a space appearing like this
This spacing uses <p> tags. If you don't want this, press shift and return; you get a space like this which is sometimes better. (This uses <br> tags)