...more recent posts
I just finished a project which basically amounted to fixing a blog based website that had been originally built by one person, and then much later "fixed" by someone else. Except here "fixing" was equivalent to "badly breaking". Nothing worked anymore. MySQL errors all over the place if you even tried to sign into the admin back end. Anyway, it's a strange hell to dive into someone else's code. I certainly wouldn't wish mine on anyone. But this was much worse than I could have imagined. Obviously it was originally done by someone with a little HTML knowledge and almost no PHP. And then "fixed" by someone who knew even less. Still, it worked out in the end and even made me look pretty good in the eyes of the guy who brought me in to do the work.
But the reason I'm posting this is because the site used TinyMCE to give the textarea posting boxes more full fledged word processing ability. You get a control strip across the top of the box and you can click to make bold, italic, insert links, make lists, etc... I've seen it before, and from reading it seems like TinyMCE is the best solution at the moment.
But, uh, wow. It's just really bad I think. Especially the way it was implemented on this site: with absolutely every option turned on. It's ridiculous. It's ugly. And it just seems to fight you every step of the way. Is it so hard to learn that a couple HTML tags? Well, yeah, I guess some people just don't want to do that. So as if in answer to my struggles this morning I found Markitup!, a much lighter weight solution. This looks really nice. It doesn't hide the HTML from you, but it does give you a bare minimum of tastefully designed short cut buttons that will insert the tags so at least you don't have to remember the exact syntax. I'll definitely be using this one in the future. Nice job.