Monday, July 11, 2005

How to install tinyMCE for ExpressionEngine

I have been running the wysiwyg editor; tinyMCE on a couple of sites and have now succesfully installed within a copy of ExpressionEngine 1.3.

In fact it doesn’t seem any different from my experience with 1.2. It seems like a few people might find it useful to get some advice as to how to set tinyMCE up. One point before we begin though; tinyMCE does not work with Safari on MAC (up to version 2 anyway) and does not work with Opera as far as I can tell. The best browser on any platform is FireFox and it works with this and Mozilla / Netscape. Internet Explorer is also fine although you will need to take care when copying and pasting content from Word. Here, then are the steps to get tinyMCE working:

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Tuesday, May 24, 2005

tinyMCE Cleaner plugin for ExpressionEngine

Note: Since version 1.4 of ExpressionEngine TinyMCE has been installable through an Extension. This is a much better way of installing. You can pick up the Extension right here

I have created a plugin for ExpressionEngine which cleans up some of the mess that tinyMCE leaves behind.

tinyMCE is a terrific ‘wysiwyg’ tool to help your content editors add a few formatting styles to the text that is entered into the fields in the ‘publish’ part of the control panel.  The problem is that, by giving your editors (and I presume that you are using ExpressionEngine as a content management system rather than just a ‘blogging’ tool) - too much control, then there is a danger that this text formatting introduced anomalies in the markup of your pages.  I have found that users of tinyMCE inadvertently wrap header tags in paragraph tags, introduce breaks in list, wrap paragraphs in paragraphs and enter empty paragraphs. Some of this happens when text is entered directly, but sometimes it happens when text is pasted into the fields from a word processor. The text, may include line breaks where paragraphs were intended, and you may even find other things happening that I have not even noticed!

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Monday, April 18, 2005

Feeding off TineMCE

Since the cat just brought a mouse into the house, I thought I should mention that TinyMCE over at MoxieCode now works with Safari version 1.3 (latest update)

Using a content management tool like ExpressionEngine is brilliant but even more so if you can get a bit of formatting in those entry boxes. I have implemented TinyMCE - a set of javascript routines that provides this functionality. Hitherto, I have been recommending FireFox, but now Safari on Mac also works because of the wonderful work reported by Dave Hyatt here

Addendum: It certainly displays the buttons but the formatting does NOT work. Back to FireFox and wait to see if this can be fixed,

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Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Lens to Screen

Ready today! I hearby announce the launch of LenToScreen, a permanent subsidiary of PageToScreen.

Ready today! I hearby announce the launch of LenToScreen, a permanent subsidiary of PageToScreen.

Expression Engine 1.2 has a built-in ‘gallery’ option, which I have managed to customise for my own purposes. I am not using all of the features of this fabulous extension which includes commenting. One feature missing for me is the possible addition of customised fields, but I note that this is a requested item on the pMachine forum. 

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Travelling on the Expression Express!

This is now coming your way on the ExpressionEngine Expressway! Thanks to wonderul technical supprt from the the people at pMachine, I have managed to convert pagetoscreen.net to use the ExpressionEngine blogging/content management tool from pMachine Pro.

pMachine is terrific but there were several reasons why I wanted to make this conversion.

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