The Science of Blogging

On a blogging platform, the editor is truly the centerpiece of the experience for many users. As such, it's crucial that the editor work flawlessly, be easy to use, be visually appealing, and allow for advanced integration that allows us to apply some SEO best practices and magic to created content.

For the past 6 months or so, we've been using the RTE from YUI as our basic editor. While visually appealing, it has some quirks that have made it difficult to use. Also, because of the nature of development on the RTE, it hasn't been as easy to integrate changes into as we needed. Most importantly, on occasion, RTE generates invalid HTML which from an SEO and usability perspective has been a nightmare.

In surveying available WYSIWYG editors, it had really just come down to a few different editors. Ones we looked at included:

YUI RTE
TinyMCE
FCKEditor

TinyMCE and FCKEditor are kind of the 'big boys' on the block if you will. When it came down to it though, after having actually looked at more than a dozen editors, the only one that repeatedly was able to produce valid HTML was FCKEditor. It's not the prettiest but it does consistently produce valid HTML and it's easy to customize and extend.

We're hoping to have the new, revamped editor out and released before the end of the year. Keep an eye on this blog.