Dealing with Wordpress and Web-based WYSIWYGs

March 7, 2012 9:02 AM

Does anyone have any tips for dealing with less savvy users of web-based WYSIWYG products like TinyMCE (which Wordpress uses) and/or improving the usability on the back-end? The best users I've worked with seem to universally use the HTML editor, while the rest fight with the visual editor to varying degrees of success.

I know the number one problem is formatted cut+pasting from word and websites, but even once some of these users get past that, issues still crop up. Any tips, or good low level documentation that someone has seen would be appreciated.

posted by yeahyeahyeahwhoo to computers & internet (4 answers total)

I'm an HTML editor user, myself - but maybe you could use shortcodes for particular problem areas. So the shortcode handles necessary formatting.
posted by backwards guitar at 9:31 AM on March 7, 2012

We've been fighting with this problem for years at my job. We've finally decided it's just not worth the agony and are migrating everything to Markdown. A lightweight markup language has its own training issues – some users are scared of anything they see as "code" – but it's making things a lot more manageable in general.
posted by brennen at 9:49 AM on March 7, 2012

I like to turn off the WYSIWIG and use Markdown.

It lets you use the HTML mode without usually having to worry about HTML.

Cut-and-paste from Word is a problem but a reasonable workaround is to:

1) cut from Word, paste into a plain text editor
2) cut from the text editor, paste into Wordpress

Notepad makes a mess of lines that wrap around, but Scite is pretty easy to use for this purpose.
posted by philipy at 9:52 AM on March 7, 2012

Cut-and-paste from Word is a problem...

Agreed. But I've found an approach that basically automates this process, at least on my Mac. I use "JumpCut" as a multiple-item clipboard manager. If I copy any text from anywhere, including Word, via the usual Ctrl-C (Command-C on a Mac), it automagically adds the copied text to its clipboard. Then, when your WordPress editor (or any editor) window is open, the text is pasted as plain-text into the editor.

I'm sure there are other clipboard managers that do the same thing, but JumpCut is the one I use.
posted by webhund at 11:41 AM on March 7, 2012