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Where are the developers ???


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6 Posts   4437 Views

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Prabhjeet

Community Member, 7 Posts

6 June 2008 at 9:35pm

I am really fed up in finding how to add FONT and COLOR option in TINYMCE editor.

But no one is giving a solid answer.

Is there anyone who can tell me how to add those options or should i move to any nother CMS for this ?

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RobertM

Community Member, 26 Posts

6 June 2008 at 11:50pm

adding FONT or COLOR options would turn the html into tag soup - a far better solution is to use CSS for styling, users can select the style from the dropdown list in TINYMCE. Generally users have very poor taste when choosing fonts and colors, so this forces them to adhere to the designers' wishes.

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Tim

Community Member, 201 Posts

7 June 2008 at 12:38am

Hi Prabhjeet,

We've made a conscious decision not to allow users of the CMS to add font and color options via the CMS. There are two reasons for this;

1) It is a not best practice generally as mentioned by Robert below

2) It leads to bad design. We've that if we give our clients too much control over the design elements of the page, they inventively undermine ascetics of the site which you've painstaking created. This is exasperated further when you have more than one author working on the site, each with their own ideas of what looks good, and how particualr bits of information should be emphasized.

By limiting the options users have we are able to preserve the integrity of the sites design.

We are of course well familiar with the arguments for allowing users to set fonts and colors "like you can in word" and in earlier versions of SilverStripe we did actually allow this however it's caused bigger problems than it's solved (and we always needed to come back in a clean things up!) so we simplified the editor and removed many of these stylistic controls. It's a good example of a situation where, as an experienced professional, you sometimes need to say no to some our your clients requests - partially when you know what the are asking for is going to be detrimental in the long term. It's in that context that we've removed these options from SilverStripe.

That said, you (as the designer / developer) can obviously set these colors and styles on behalf of your clients/users of the CMS. You can do this by editing the typography.css file.

..and of course if you totally disagree with our approach, you can edit the TinyMCE editor to your hearts content.. the beauty of open source :-)

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Aaron

Community Member, 63 Posts

8 June 2008 at 11:28am

Prabhjeet, If you are fed up with trying to find help with customizing TinyMCE on the Silverstripe Forum, why not go to the TinyMCE website? It's not like the SS developers build TinyMCE themselves.

From my experience as a web developer, both posts above me a spot on. Giving your users too much control over changing fonts and colors just opens the door for a very ugly website.

CSS styles is easily the way to go.

You will find that the other major CMS's use TinyMCE or FCKEditor. So you'll probably be faced the the same issue if you really want to add fonts/colors/sizes. It's just bad practise.

Cheers
Aaron

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Prabhjeet

Community Member, 7 Posts

8 June 2008 at 2:24pm

Well guys, thanks for your opinions. I have already read those replies about the benefit to remove those options. I knew this already what you said. Obviously it is better idea to let user to manage content without these color and font options. But I wanted to know if I WANT TO ADD those options again then how can i do ? Well i will go to TinyMCE's website to see how can i do this. Anyways many thanks for your supports.

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sarahk

Community Member, 46 Posts

5 August 2008 at 2:01pm

Another opinion on this

Newsletters need brute force use of fonts, sizes and colours - so the newsletter part of silverstripe needs to allow the use of them.

Go to the tiny mce website and you'll find the instructions to manipulate the toolbars but they are overriden in silverstripe.

I totally support the reasons why you don't want them in the CMS but they are NEEDED in the newsletter section.