Writing articles with ckeditor

[pwired]

Hi,

I am just wondering: who is successfully writing articles with text and pictures, only using ckeditor and the body field ?

I stopped using ckeditor a long time ago for this because I can never get the position of the text and the images

the way it is needed for a layout in a project. Using inline css in ckeditor is not recommended.

So, I only use ckeditor for text wich I give in the source of ckeditor a simple div tag with an id:

<div id="text">text for article.....</div>

Then I use css to do what I need for the text such as position, fontsize, fonttype, color, etc.

Same with pictures, not loading in ckeditor but pull directly from the images field and use css to do what I need

same as for the text I write in ckeditor.

Do you agree with this, or is it somehow still possible to write articles with text and pictures directly in ckeditor ?

[Martijn Geerts]

I purely use CKEditor for text and text only. And only allow a few HTML tags.

Mostly h2, h3, h4, then p, strong, em, ul, li and a.

I disable the pwimage, table and all other thing not related to pure markup text.

All other content could be added with a page table field row.

So if they need a form, a map, an photo album, a single photo or something else, they can add it via the page table.

All rows of the table are looped and set to a variable. That variable is set to the template and rendered on the main view.

[Joss]

It depends on what I am doing. On article orientated sites I use CKEditor a lot in conjunction with Hanna code. 

So I might create code for spoilers or blocks and so on. It is all down to who is updating that part of the site and how much training they have.

I never use it fully configured, however.

[Can]

We're actually using ckeditor with images and because on happygaia.com it's only me and my girlfriend I enabled full html, could be better but it's working okay so far

[Christophe]

For the moment, I've always used it. I'll have to try it in inline mode also.

If needed, I center images in a paragraph with "Styles".

I have already aligned images to the left (or the right) of some text, but have found (again) that it can be a problem when displayed on very small screens, perhaps more when the text is justified.

Like others, I also use directly the images field to automatically generate a slideshow, an image gallery... with the field inserted in the template file.

Concerning the Files field, I've just noticed that it's possible, for example, to drag and drop a pdf file to the ckeditor field.

It automatically adds the link, the text being the name_of_the_pdf_file.pdf.

If we go to edit the link, we see that Target is already set to "_blank", which I think is good by default.

I don't know if I should add this to the Whishlist Forum, but at least with the image management option, I think it would be perfect if it would let the Title field "empty" and just use the Description of the image (Images field) for the alt tag.

Without the image management option, it could directly use the Description of the image for the "Title" field.

Currently it adds the name_of_the_pdf_file.pdf to the "Title" field, which isn't really necessary.

Edit: I've just noticed/realized that it apparently works when there is only one pdf file in the Files field.

Because then, even if I click on the pdf link, the "row" is moved instead of the link.

It would be nice if, with Shift, Ctrl or something else, we could do it even with multiple files.

But I guess it wouldn't be very practical if there were too many files (rows).

[teppo]

Hi,

I am just wondering: who is successfully writing articles with text and pictures, only using ckeditor and the body field ?

Hi. Me. On just about all sites I've built in the past few year, both my own ones and those built for clients.

Layouts consisting of blocks or "widgets" created via PageTable or Repeater fields have their use cases, but for regular content CKEditor works just fine and provides a sensible balance between flexibility and structure. It's true that getting CKEditor to behave takes a little bit of effort, but on the other hand I've noticed that most people familiar with the eccentricities of Word tend to be very much at home when it comes to CKEditor

I've use Hanna Code in some specific cases, but to be honest it hasn't really been that helpful. Most non-technical users prefer the interface of CKEditor ("it's like Word") and strongly dislike anything that feels like "coding". Even those users who get it tend to forget which snippets the site has and how they work (which is why I built the Hanna Code Helper module in the first place).

Like Joss already pointed out, it really depends on what you're building, and for whom.

[BitPoet]

We're using CKEdtior quite heavily in our intranet (used to be TinyMCE in the previous CMS, but that had all kinds of issues with new browsers). The tech departments write their internal data sheets and part compatibility lists with it, using nested tables (now way around that, unfortunately) and a concise set of CSS classes. Most departments also have a bunch of CKEditor-only pages for their department presentations, useful information for everyone and for anything and everything in their internal department areas. Alltogether, that's a few thousand of these pages. Not everything is as homogenous as we'd need a public-facing homepage to be, but it's not as far off as one would fear either.

My experience regarding Hanna Code (or any other placeholder system) is much like teppo's, most users can't wrap their heads around the question why they should use these "magic thingies" when everything else is wysiwyg, and they keep forgetting which is which.