Wygwam: New WYSIWYG Editor for EE
Today Brandon Kelly, creator of Playa and FieldFrame released a new fieldtype for FieldFrame called Wygwam, which is based on the CKEditor tool. Brandon has taken CKEditor, with its slick UI and customizability, improved upon it and made it into a high quality FieldFrame fieldtype.
Using a drag and drop interface, you can easily set up multiple types of Wygwam toolbars based on need; one toolbar for the body field, one for the excerpt, or maybe even one for someone that needs some extra help in formatting text. Those custom toolbars are saved as presets, so you can reuse them as needed.
WYSIWYG editors aren’t new to ExpressionEngine; we’ve been jamming them into EE for a long time. It wasn’t always pretty and the installation wasn’t always easy. In fact, I’ve never used them for any projects because they always felt forced and created junk markup. The markup produced by CKEditor, on which Wygwam is based, isn’t perfect, but it’s better than most WYSIWYG editors out there.
Wygwam is a commercial product and costs $29. It requires FieldFrame 1.3.1 or later, PHP 5 or later and ExpressionEngine 1.6+. It’s available now at Brandon’s website.
Watch Wygwam in action in my demo video.
Posted on Sep 01, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
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Brandon Kelly — 13:16 on 09.01.2009
Thanks for posting this, Ryan!
mirkob — 13:20 on 09.01.2009
That’s very nice…
Does it integrate the upload feature for picture and flash, too?
John Faulds — 14:15 on 09.01.2009
The customisation of the toolbars in WYGWAM is very cool but it’s worth pointing out that you can do the same with the TinyMCE fieldtypes too, in fact, you probably have more control over those as it seems from the screencast that you can only add and remove ‘groups’ of buttons rather than individual ones which you can do with TinyMCE (although the process isn’t as easy and user-friendly for those who don’t know TinyMCE that well).
Being a long-time TinyMCE user and having had a look recently at WYMEditor, are there any other advantages to using CKEditor over the others other than the UI?
Geof Harries — 06:11 on 09.02.2009
John - From my perspective, the advantages are what you state: ease of installation and a better user interface. Those two attribute alone are worth the $29 entry fee, especially for clients maintaining their own site.
Brandon — 06:44 on 09.02.2009
Video isnt working - I’d love to see this in action before I buy it.
johnniefp — 12:55 on 09.02.2009
@Brandon.
Try the video in IE. I’ve noticed the .mov not working in Firefox too.
Ryan Irelan — 13:01 on 09.02.2009
Sorry about the video issues. I used the new Quicktime to export it and apparently it doesn’t play well with Firefox. Working on a solution, but if you’re interested in the raw mov file you can get it here: http://eeinsider.com/demos/eeinsider-wygwam-editor/eeinsider-wygwam-editor.mov
That should work in Firefox.
Ryan Battles — 05:48 on 09.15.2009
Still curious about image and file integration with this editor. I have yet to find an easy solution to this with EE. I have tried to go sans WYSIWYG, but after about two days I get a phone call from the client wanting to know how to make lists. So I go WYSIWYG, but then they mess things up in 1.5 days because they paste from Word.
Here is a killer feature… are there any editors that will not allow pasting without using either a plaintext filter or word filter?
Tim Day — 20:38 on 05.29.2010
Thanks for the video. It makes all this editor comparison, etc. clear to me (finally).