Major Hurdles in 1.6 Development

If you checked out the blog lately, you might already know about some big changes with a WYSIWYG editor coming in phpLinkBid 1.6. At the risk of being hunted down and strangled by one of our many anxious users for being forced to wait even longer, I made the move to TinyMCE as the editor platform for phpLinkBid 1.6 and all future Kytoo scripts. After weeks of work, it nearly puts Wordpress to shame.

Why do I say that? Many people familiar with Wordpress are already used to using TinyMCE - it's the default post editor in Wordpress. The WP developers have made some very nice enhancements to the interface, which makes it very pleasing to use. Despite the Visual/HTML tabs, expanding toolbar (the "kitchen sink"), and other neat stuff, it's still a clunky code editor and working in "HTML mode" just gives you a plain text area. I like what they've done, but think it could be better.

The goal with our content editor is to be dead-simple for beginners, yet feature-rich for advanced users. That means a simple interface with the necessary tools to publish rich content, and advanced features for experienced coders. And all of it in a format that doesn't overwhelm the average user.

The biggest addition to the editor is a real code editor - not just a textarea. The greatest improvement here is the addition of HTML mode with full syntax highlighting, code checking, auto-indentation, and line numbering. The new editor implements the powerful codemirror library into TinyMCE with some serious tweaks and customizations.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I thought I'd share a sneak peek of what's to come. Note that Internet Explorer users won't see those nice rounded edges on the buttons - aside from that it's all the same.

Standard Editor:

Editor w/ Extra Toolbar:

Source Code Editor:

These screens are not the final version. Expect a few nice suprises and some changes as we shake out the bugs. Anyone who dislikes the new editor, can't stand WYSIWYG, or refuses to use anything except Netscape 4 - you can easily disable the rich editor from your site configuration.