Hi All-
I guess I don’t quite understand the way in which EE outputs xhtml. I’m working on a site (www.livinghopeineugene.com) and I want the non-tech-savvy client to be able to add photos, unordered lists, etc to the entries. It appears that the only way to do this out of the box with EE, is to have the client use the buttons to help outline content with HTML tags (not extremely intuitive). Next, I’m finding that even coding the content in XHTML isn’t enough, because if you try to lay out an img tag or an ul on separate lines to make it readable, EE adds line break tags.

I’ve tried the TinyMCE extension and find that that muddies the waters because it has similar problems and occasionally outputs Word formatting and inline CSS styling when the client copy and pastes from Word.

Does any of this sound familiar to any of you? Any ideas/resources about formatting content in EE would be helpful.

I use Smartypants & Markdown for that purpose. It’s not exactly WYSIWYG, but I found it intuitive enough even for semi computer-literate users.

Thanks Ingmar-
However, I must be really dumb, because I can’t quite tell what these two things do and how they help with the problem. Can you help me out, as I must be missing something.

Thanks a ton!

Well, Smartpypants really was an afterthought, as you were trying to “get rid of linebreaks”, and it also can help with pasted Word documens a lot.

I don’t use TinyMCE or FCKeditor, because I don’t like the code they produce. In short, there is no WYSIWYG editor good enough just yet. So, the next best thing is an editor that supports an alternative notation, like Markdown or Textile. In all these cases, you would not use Formatting: XHTML, but let another plugin handle that.

I’d suggest to give MarkitUp a shot, there’s a nice extension by Ryan Masuga.

Thanks Ingmar-
I’ve been out for awhile, but this is helpful. I’m not a real fan of what TinyMCE does to my code either. I’ve noticed in the demos of EE2 that there appears to be improvements in the publish area…do you have any sense as to whether this is going to trickle down into typography?

Sorry, there’s no way of knowing. I am not even sure it’s been decided yet…

Ingmar:

I’m curious if you’ve tried wysiwygPro, and if so, what you think of it. It produces valid code (albeit not in the way I would normally code, but I’m not an expert!).

Just curious.

Frank

Not really, no, but the quick look I took had me not overly excited. For starters, they only support a handful of browsers (Opera, my browser of choice, not being among them).