More TinyMCE tweaks

I’ve been playing around some more with TinyMCE so that I can get it to do what I want, both in WordPress and as a WYSIWYG editor on our Content Management System. I get a little closer each day, but the process is slow. My stuggles have been with trying to get it to produce valid XHTML. Why the folks at TinyMCE don’t see fit to have it write standards compliant strict XHTML as an option is a mystery to me but with a combination of configuration manipulations and plugins I’ve almost there.

The plugins I’ve installed are

• XHTML Helper
• XHTML Extras
• Custom Bullet

I also wrote a plugin that will add the ability to insert q (quotation) tags. I based this plugins on the code in the XHTML Extras plugin which was very easy to understand.

Another issue I needed to solve is changing the way TinyMCE does alignment of text. Instead of doing align="center" I want it to write style="text-align:center". I found a piece of Javascript posted in the TinyMCE forums that will deal with this and it works very well.

The last thing that I wanted to do to make TinyMCE suit my needs was create a series of styles that would allow text to be formatted in a set of standard ways. The most important of these was giving people the ability to indent text in a consistent standards compliant (ie not blockquote for not blockquote text) way. To do this I added classes to my site’s stylesheet for different levels of indentation. I also created a style for the types of hangining indentation that is used for bibliographies. This has allowed us to create web pages in a more uniform manner.

I hope that I’ll be able to port these changes to the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress. How well I can do this will depend on the capabilities of the version of TinyMCE incorporated into WordPress.