Integrating The Editor

The Ephox Weblog pointed me to James Robertson’s comments on Seth Gottlieb’s article, “Homebrew CMS” all of which is good reading. The key part for me is:

Editing environment. If the authors can’t easily and efficiently get their words onto the site, you’re toast. There’s a huge amount that goes into a good editing tool, including table support, CSS, images, spell checking, and clean cut-and-pasting from Word. Even if you chose to use one of the commercial editing tools (a good idea!), it still needs to be tightly integrated into the CMS.

Integrating the editor into the CMS well is a key attribute to making things easy for users. The vast majority of the time, users will be creating content in the editor so your selection of editors is really important. However, at fairly regular intervals during content creation users will want to interact with the system – to insert an image from the repository (or upload a new one), link to existing content or apply a standard page element. You need to make sure that those actions are available from within the editor instead of requiring the user to go over to some other part of the interface.

You should also take some time to integrate the styles for your site with the editor. Each editor has a different way of exposing the styles to the user and you need to make sure that applying the right style is simple and intuitive for users. You also want to think about what menu and toolbar items are appropriate for the content your users are creating – the interface may need to be changed from the default or even customized on a per user or role basis. Taking the time to properly integrate the editor can be the difference between a successful deployment or having an expensive system go unused.

There’s a lot of tips on ways to improve the editing experience over at LiveWorks! It’s centered around EditLive! but the ideas apply to most editors.