Drupal Text Editors

Introduction

The most common activity in maintaining any website is the addition of content, which, for the most part, equates to adding text. That text will need to be marked-up in various ways using HTML tags to indicate the presence within the text of different font styles, paragraph indentations, lists, links, embedded images, and the many other attributes that that are required to produce an attractively formatted web page.

One option is to enter the HTML mark-up directly. However, even for those with the relevant knowledge, doing so is slow and error prone. And for many larger sites, the management of content is delegated to business authors who are entirely lacking in HTML expertise.

Therefore a basic requirement for any worthwhile CMS framework is a Wysiwyg text editor. Surprisingly, while Drupal supports about ten different Wysiwyg editors, none of them is supplied as part of the core Drupal 7 release, requiring the installation and configuration of non-core modules.

In Drupal 7, Wysiwyg functionality is split into two components, an editor integration module, “Wysiwyg 7.x-2.2”, and a separate text editor module.

As there are many Wysiwyg editors supported by Drupal, the question you might be asking is “Which is one is the best?” For a review (dating from 2010 and now somewhat out of date) see the Brighternet article. The Wysiwyg editors that are most widely used within the Drupal community are TinyMCE and CKEditor – of the two, TinyMCE requires less by way of installation effort.

To install “Wysiwyg 7.x-2.2” and “TinyMCE 3.5.8” use the following links:

Installing Wysiwyg Editor Integration

Installing the TinyMCE Editor

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