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New JCE WYSIWYG Editor is in beta and what a beauty it is! |
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Everything Joomla!
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Written by Jack Hughes
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Wednesday, 13 December 2006 |
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OK so roll your eyes now. I know what you're saying, "How can Jack refer to WYSIWYG editor as being beautiful? .... what a nerd." First off I'm a geek not a nerd (geeks wear practical, yet fashionable shoes...nerds don't). Secondly, JCE is a real beaut. because this little editor will make your content look great. It has more powerful features to satisfy an uber-geek yet still maintains it's easy to use interface.
Let's take a step back and talk briefly about what a WYSIWYG editor is.
What You See Is What You Get (wysiwyg) get it! Whenever you are entering or editing content into our Joomla websites and you get to a big text field (ya know, where you type lots of stuff) you'll notice a bunch of icon toolbars that sit just above that field. It looks a bit like M$ Word tool bars with Bold, Italics, Indent, Bullets, etc... This is JCE and it allows you to format you content just as you would format any text in a word processor.
View of JCE Editor window with toolbars.
Other than the obvious formatting benefits this editor affords, JCE has 2 things that I think are a must in adding content.
1) JCE Image Manager allows you to upload a photo from your computer to the server and then resizes on the fly to a preset max size AND it will auto create thumbnails for you if you wish! After uploading, all you have to do is click on the image in the JCE Image Manager to select it and click on the insert button and presto! you have a perfectly placed photo in your article.
2) JCE File Manager works just like the Image Manager however it allows you to upload documents (like PDF files) to the server and then links to the document(s) from within your article. However, even though it's easy to use, we don't recommend using File Manager to manage large document libraries.
Now for the really good part of the new JCE! (ver. 1.1.0)
click to enlarge
JCE now includes a Lightbox style image popup for your content articles! (remember, I'm a geek and get excited by this stuff) The best way to explain what the heck I'm talking about is to just show you. See this image thumbnail to the right of this text? Click on it and behold the beauty of the Lightbox style image popup!
You gotta admit that's pretty cool and darn good looking. It's what I call the "spit and polish" that gives a site a really put together look. We can also link together a series of photos and create a ad-hoc photo gallery on your page.
This version of JCE (ver. 1.1.0) is in beta, which means it's still a little bit buggy. We have installed it on our site and on another test server and fully expect a "stable" version first quarter of 2007. Since all of our Clients with Joomla sites already have JCE installed, all we need to do is a simple upgrade and your set. We do have to go back and do a little retrofit work on older content images if you want to use the popup lightbox with them. It's no big deal, we can show you how and you can do it on your own if you wish.
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