Rich-Text Editors for 2010 and Beyond

Rich-Text Editors for 2010 and Beyond

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Rich-Text Editors, inline content editors, WYSIWYG editors – or whatever you want to call them – are web applications that enable users to enter, edit and manipulate alphanumeric characters while visiting your website. Wherever you have a <textarea>form input on your site, chances are good that its usability could be improved with a Rich-Text Editor.

For example, your comment form is a great place to provide users with the ability to customize their responses with a few clicks of the mouse. RTEs help your visitors format and edit their web-based content by transforming an ordinary input field into a fully functional HTML editor.

 

By making it easy to markup and format content, Rich Text Editors provide an excellent way to improve the usability and "coolness" factor of your website. Even better is the fact that there are many RTEs available, each with their own features, strengths and weaknesses.

To help you sort through the many choices, here are 22 of the best Rich-Text Editors for 2010 and beyond.

1. TinyMCE

TinyMCE is a free, open-source Rich Text Editor (RTE) from Moxiecode Systems AB. It is lightweight and easy to customize via themes, plugins, and its own API. As a platform-independent web-based WYSIWYG editor, TinyMCE is easy to integrate into virtually any Content Management System.

Bottom line: TinyMCE is browser-friendly, lightweight, highly customizable and features tons of great community support.

2. FCKEditor

FCKeditor is a free, open-source RTE that has been around forever. It features image uploading, layout templates, valid code, Adobe AIR, custom styles, and much more. FCKeditor is perfect for table creation and can even clean up text pasted from Microsoft Word.

Bottom line: FCKeditor is highly customizable, fully accessible, well supported and very popular.

3. YUI Editor

The YUI Editor is included as part of the extensive Yahoo User-Interface Library (YUI). YUI Editor features valid XHTML, a growing number of plugins, decent documentation, great support for mobile devices, and even drag-n-drop inclusion and sizing of images. Plus, the YUI Editor’s toolbar is easily extensible for advanced and highly customized implementations.

Bottom line: the perfect RTE solution if you are already using the YUI Library.

4. NicEdit

NicEdit is a lightweight, cross-platform Inline Content Editor (ICE) that focuses on usability and simplicity. The file size is extremely small, less than 10KB compressed, and can be served directly from the NicEdit website. Although the code may need some scrubbing to validate, the sheer compactness and ease of NicEdit makes it perfect for smaller projects and simple implementations.

Bottom line: NicEdit is a lightweight, good-looking RTE that makes it easy to convert any <textarea> or <div> into a robust Inline Content Editor.

5. Kupu

Kupu is an open-source RTE provided by OSCOM. Designed for easy integration intoCMSs such as Silva and Plone, Kupu