I was recently presented with two projects at work that offered me a good opportunity to delve into the 'scary' world of Javascript WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) content editors for the web.
Normally, I try to avoid Javascript like the plague, but lately with the advent of AJAX and Javascript effect packages, I'm feeling a bit more used to it.
In this case, I needed two specific and diverse solutions to a few problems I had.
Problem 1: I needed a way to embed an editable spreadsheet in a web page without any special plug-ins or proprietary Microsoft scripts. In basic terms: a web spreadsheet application.
Solution: CodeThat, a small venture heralding from the Ukraine offers a powerful, simple, and easy to configure all-in-one solution called CodeThatGrid.
The power of this software is it's simple ability to allow any web user access to a simplistic replica of Microsoft Excel. It closely resembles Microsoft's product in form and function, so there isn't much of a learning curve. Best of all, it's relatively lightweight size-wise and seems to have a robust feature-set. Overall, I think it's a great solution for a tough problem.
Problem 2: I needed a simple yet powerful text editor that would allow a user to post content to the web without the need to know any html or any knowledge beyond Microsoft Word. In basic terms: an advanced rich text editor.
Solution: After lot's of research, Moxiecode's TinyMCE seemed to have the easiest to use and most robustly supported Rich Text Editor I could find at this time.
When fully decked out, this thing looks almost exactly like Microsoft Word… and has almost all of the features. Some highlights: real-time spell checking, table support, image insertion (even an optional file/image management system), a fully-compliant gzip compressor, and support for PHP, JSP, .NET, and Coldfusion. It works well and I'm thoroughly impressed by the wide range of plug-ins and options available for the software.
So, remember to check them out if you have a need for some powerful WYSIWYG tools for your next web project. And no, neither one of these companies paid me for this review. I truly just like them a lot!
January 7th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
I totally agree about TinyMCE. I have used it before and it works real well but it can be a little slow sometimes.
January 8th, 2007 at 11:22 am
Have you taken a look at Google docs? http://docs.google.com/
January 8th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Yeah, Google's stuff is really sweet and works better than any other WYSIWYG I've seen yet (which is why they are pretty popular).
However, I can't embed a general worksheet into my site without relying on their servers, et cetera. I would have to have access to their API and the actual source files to achieve what I needed.
Regardless, I hope that the makers of TinyMCE and CODETHATGRID take a few notes from Google. There are some particular features/aspects of Google's WYSIWYG apps that are very impressive and very useful.
- Dustin