I wrote recently about my unfortunate experiences with Foliopress WYSIWYG – a WordPress plugin text editor – and the even more unfortunate attitude of one of its authors (that type of person who thinks he’s right about everything, and even on those occasions when he actually is, he can’t leave it there and has to be so right-with-knobs-on that he ends up wrong anyway!)
We’ve all encountered these unpleasant individuals.
The long and short of the matter is that when I installed Foliopress back in May this year, it was much better than the default WordPress editor at that time, but it still had some limitations. It took a lot of effort getting it to work anything like it was supposed to (which introduced me to the extremely distasteful aspect of the user support interface). Then there was the unbelievable “it doesn’t work with any Microsoft crap” attitude that was dumped on everyone without warning (a poor attempt to disguise the fact that they couldn’t get it to work with Internet Explorer – the most common browser out there). It wasn’t true WYSIWYG, either. You really had to mess around to get it even close to WYSIWYG – but this was initially tolerable, as were the frequent updates.
But the last straw came when it simply stopped working – even in browsers that weren’t “crap Microsoft” efforts. I guess that rampant intellectual inferiority must have spread to the rest of the human population, leaving the Foliopress plugin as a lone beacon (albeit, without anything to act as a beacon with, since a plugin depends on the product it is written for, and not the other way around) in the software development community.
So after one final experience of appalling customer support, I got rid of it once and for all.
Anyway, anyone out there who is also looking for suitable WYSIWYG editors for WordPress might be interested in the following.
First of all, WordPress’ own editor is now pretty good. In all honesty, in terms of text formatting, it is just about as WYSIWYG as I could ever get Foliopress to be (and that was after asking for help to set it up). The text wraps around images, and you can resize the editor window to alter the WYSIWYGness of the display. OK, it’s only black Times New Roman on a white background, but you can use it to get a reasonable idea of your post/page layouts – and in any case, you still have the Preview button..
But I have found something which is absolutely and completely WYSIWYG. It is also standalone – not a plugin – but it connects to your WordPress account so you can publish posts or pages, or simply safe them to draft as it suits you. It downloads the template for your blog and uses that, so what you are typing is exactly what appears when you publish.
It’s Windows Live Writer (part of Live Essentials). Yes, yet again the solution to a problem existed, and it was a Microsoft solution!
Unlike plugins, which must be installed on each blog or site you use them on, Live Writer can be linked to any number of blog accounts, because it resides on your computer – not on the blog site. You can get various plugins for the program to make adding symbols or Flash easier, or you can simply use cut-and-paste, etc.
It does take a little getting used to, but if you use Office then it will be easier. If you want genuine WYSIWYG then this really is the business.