Looking for a fix to Joomla's non-friendly content editor.

August 26, 2008 3:00 AM

Joomla filter: I have a client with a Joomla site already built, but they do not like the built in editor for it. Is there any way of changing it, or is there a plug-in that can added?

I am a web developer, but do not know much of Joomla. I am taking over a project that has a Joomla site attached to it. As I or anyone who works with me knows very little about Joomla, I have decided to hire out on Elance for a Joomla developer to help me out.

However I would like to know a few things before I do that. The main problem my client has is that the content editor is horrible. He wants to be able to make his own articles and updates to the site. But the built in editor only allows you to be able to see the section you're working on, not how it fits into the page as a whole. Are there any work arounds for this? Perhaps a plug in or something that improves this? Or even a trick that others use?

I've contacted a pretty major company's developer who is also using Joomla in the same fashion, and their response was that they don't use the built in editor at all, instead using an outside editor and then just using Joomla to plug it in. This is not the best solution for my client.

Open to any and all suggestions.

Thanks.

posted by wile e to computers & internet (2 comments total)

It is easy to plugin a different content editor. You can see a list of available editors as well as their ratings at http://extensions.joomla.org. It has been a while since I used any though so I can't provide a recommendation for the best editor currently. When I did use them (around a year ago) I found it tricky to get the results you wanted and a bit buggy - perhaps things have improved since then. It can be made easier to a certain extent by setting up custom styles for use by the editor.

Regarding them being able to edit the whole site at once. That will be difficult as different parts of the site are changed in different places. Most of what is around the content block is handled by the template which can be edited through the Admin panel but shouldn't really be edited by users without sufficient knowledge.

Also, which version of Joomla are they using? This will affect your options too. I don't have much experience with v1.5.
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 5:30 AM on August 26, 2008

I've installed a couple of Joomla 1.5 sites this week (just experimenting) - the best content editor plugin seems to be JCE, which is the first plugin in the list pointed to by Gomez_in_the_South.

This is based on TinyMCE which is also the default editor in Joomla 1.5 IIRC, so they're pretty similar. The main advantage JCE has is a number of extra plugins for manipulating files, images, etc, but you need to pay for those.

The main question about the existing site is if they are using Joomla 1.5 at all, or the older version 1.0. This would require some kind of upgrade, which I've no idea about I'm afraid.

According to some stuff in forums, it would appear that Joomla 1.5.6 is supposed to have inline editing from the front end, but I can't get it to work for me.
posted by kothar at 7:54 AM on August 26, 2008