Twilight Universe

I probably owe an apology to Matt.

A while ago I posted a rather… erm… abrasive comment on his blog when he mentioned WordPress was going to be using TinyMCE as a WYSIWYG editor.

I’d just spent a lot of time wrestling with different editors for a work project. TinyMCE in particular was proving a pain in the neck. So perhaps I wasn’t in a particularly good frame of mind to recieve this information. Owen was nice enough to let me try out WP1.6 on his site (I hadn’t worked up the courage to do so on this site, though I have now) and my opinion changed about WYSIWYG in WordPress: It works, and works well.

However this is not your normal WYSYWIG.

Most WYSIWYG software, TinyMCE included, seems to have this facination with pretending to be Microsoft Word. This means that you get a plethora of options, gradient toolbars, clever menu effects, attractive rollovers… and the running speed of a zombie turtle crawling up the beach with a large angry walrus strapped to its back…

All the compression and optimisation in the world won’t help you when you are loading that much stuff at once. It might download fast, but JavaScript isn’t known for its speed. Also, being the geek I am, I found much of the code produced by the leading editors to be… awful. Full of BR’s and other relics of 1997.

Generally WYSIWYG has been a gimmicky, browser-incompatible, slow, frustrating experience for me on the web. However, as I said, this is not the same.

The WYSIWYG editor that comes with (the still ALPHA-DO-NOT-USE!) WordPress 1.6 is a wonderfully stripped down version of TinyMCE. It does exactly what you need it to, and no more. It integrates with the page, rather than being a bulky add-on, and generally feels “right”. Despite my reservations I am impressed.

That said: it isn’t perfect. Then again the software isn’t finished. Already the code produced is much much nicer and, for the most part, is clean and semantic code. It’s still not instant to load (I have to wait a few seconds before I can edit posts, longer entries seem to make it take longer), but it isn’t slow either.

Both Matt and I agree that the core of WordPress is writing: getting your words on the page as cleanly, simply, and attractively as possible. I’m not convinced the new editor improves this process any, and if you want to add HTML code to a page then it may hinder you, but it certainly works well. For most people, and most entries it works well, and looks good.

I still think it is a bit of a gimmick. I also don’t feel it improves the writing process much, if at all, but as it actually works and does no harm… I guess I can put up with it (though if Owen wants to tell me now to add in the patch he wrote for it… I’ll be much happier).

I said, in my original comment to Matt:

“I’ll still be turning TinyMCE off, initially anyhow, but I’ll be happily waiting for the time I can use it without shouting.”

Well, I’m using it now; and I’m not shouting. I won’t say it’s perfect — a lot of the freedom of the way I publish the content isn’t available to me right now — but I am hopeful that WP still “gets it” and the visual improvments of 1.6 hide the more esoteric improvements. Certainly it seems faster (less SQL queries for a start… though I still think 30+ is too much), and it is nicer to use the admin panel. WYSIWYG is what people will notice however and right now it seems that it works. I’m impressed, and pleasantly surprised, at how well TinyMCE has been adapted (and those changes will be folded back into it, so its all good for the software).

So, to conclude: Sorry Matt. I was wrong. Thank god for that.