wysiwyg

Most people who have grown up on the web, and have used Wysiwyg utilities online, or newer text editors/word processing applications are used to having a simple 'return' create a new paragraph, with (on average) one extra line of empty space between the new paragraph and the one before it.

However, a lot of people like having the 'return' key just go down one line. There are a few ways this is possible in most Wysiwygs:

• You can change the block style from 'Paragraph' (which creates <p> tags around new lines of text) to 'div' (which creates <div> tags around new lines of text).
• You can press Shift + Return when you want to just go down one line (using a <br /> tag instead of a <p> tag).

I use the second method when I'm using a Wysiwyg, as I like using paragraphs (which are semantic for text, and which allow for better CSS styling than a monolithic block of text with linebreaks). I also rarely use a Wysiwyg editor, so it's not really an issue for me anyways ;-)

I haven't seen much about this feature yet, so I figured I'd put it through its paces and share what I found. WYSIWYG editing on iOS devices is finally here! For a long time, contentEditable support has been lacking on iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches, and it's been slightly annoying, as the only way to add richly-formatted text on these devices was doing a two-step through finding the carat characters and writing the HTML yourself.

Plus, some WYSIWYG editors (like TinyMCE) simply disabled the WYSIWYG from attaching to a textarea if it detected an iOS device. No longer, however: I've tested CKEditor (latest nightly) and TinyMCE (latest nightly), and both work perfectly (surprisingly well, in fact!) on the iPad running iOS 5 beta 6:

Thanks to iOS5's support for contentEditable text areas, rich text editors like TinyMCE and CKEditor (two of my favorites, which I install on many Drupal sites using the WYSIWYG module) now work great for editing content on the web in mobile Safari!

This means that I'll be more likely to do site content work on the road with my iPad 2. I just wish they supported file select fields so I could also add images more easily on the go.

Check out all the details over on Midwestern Mac: WYSIWYG Editing (contentEditable support) in iOS 5.

A few months ago, I was starting to get fed up with having to manually re-patch the WYSIWYG module on about five of my sites every time it was due for an update, to incorporate functionality that I had hoped would make it into WYSIWYG as a regular button/plugin (see issue).

Well, after months of that issue's inactivity, I decided to take the bull by its horns and write up a proper module that would hook into WYSIWYG and allow me to (a) provide the functionality I needed to a wider audience, and (b) save me an extra minute of time per site upgrade (no more patches!).

Thus, WYSIWYG Force Linebreaks was born.

This module helps me with many of my sites - for many different reasons.