The Publishing Balance

It brings me to tears

[asomervell]

I run a site with a lot of editorial content being added by people that dont seem to care how things are formatted, either that or it looks ok in word so they copy and paste, hit "add" and away they go... Some seem to think they should change the font (which most WYSIWYG editors will wrap a font tag round and let them do), MOST seem to interpret the word formatting, they all seem horrible at using <p></p> as opposed to putting <br/><br/> between pargraphs.

Over the year's i've used various WYSIWYG editors... At the moment I think we're using HTMLAREA. My problem seems to be the trade off between having something people recognise and dont balk at and giving them too much control.

I imagine there are others out there that have had the same problem, im sick of telling our editorial staff to paste things into notepad before the site (to get rid of the formatting) and I think I might change the input to be a textarea just like the one i'm typing in now with something like textile.

Thoughts? Found any gems that dont let idiots add formatting they shouldnt?

[benihana]

dont let idiots add formatting they shouldnt

idiots? or people whose job it isnt to code html?

Last time came across this problem, we added a css rule:

font {
color:red !important;
font-weight:bold !important;
text-decoration:underline !important;
}

Which got rid of the that particular issue, but obviously cannnot fix things like missing alt attributes, <br>'s etc etc.

The main thing you can try is education - what not to do and why, and alternative (valid) methods, but getting people to pay attention is another battle in itself.

[asomervell]

I will openly admit that the first problem is the users. Heh :)

But the beauty of the publishing system that I'm building is that every person or place on our guide can add events relevant to them and update their profile... These people arent geeks, the acronym "HTML" makes them throw their hands in the air and run around madly until they hit a wall...

I dont expect them to code HTML, I want them as far away from it as possible, but in all seriousness they need to be able to:

- Set heading styles (restricted to heading1, heading2, heading3)
- Make lists
- Make text bold and italic
- Make links
- Insert Images

That is the sum total of what I want them to do...

People seem to be able to manage bbcode on forums and im seriously considering finding some class that just does that... again, textile seems about the closest and I could have a "how to" link just above the editor...