Drupal: WYSIWY(should)G

A rather annoying problem with Drupal is the lack of a *really* standard WYSIWYG interface. WordPress made the example and included TinyMCE as a default which is expandable with a couple of plugins (“TinyMCE Advanced”). Putting together a solution which also allows users to easily upload and include pictures into article texts with Drupal took me quite a long time. And every possible way I tried out had it’s own little problems – be it usability, be it incompatibilities with other plugins, you name it.

The combination which posed the smallest problems to me AND the users so far was this one:

WYSIWYG/TinyMCE + ImageAssist

The WYSIWYG-Plugin is trying to become the standard gateway for a number of editors and ImageAssist already supports it (on TinyMCE). Everything is rather Beta for now, but it works and it’s more promising in terms of future development than other solutions. However, I still hope that Drupal 7 will include a streamlined solution (like WordPress 2.8) for editing and importing images into posts. That’s really a keyfeature for a web CMS and if this is buggy or hard to use for the editor, you can only lose the game, because the main focus for most users is usability these days. Compensating the lack of usability with feature richness isn’t doing the trick for me.

One downside of this combination is that if you use ImageAPI aswell, you can not yet share images between the two media libraries. For instance, you cannot select images from a gallery created with ImageAPI/ImageCache/Views in ImageAssist’s “select image to include”-dialogs.

That’s why I really would like to see a little bit more standardisation for media integration in Drupal. It’s nice to have a huge number of options, but media integration is something really standard nowadays. And from my point of view, I prefer one stable solution over 20 half-baked solutions in alpha/beta stage, even if they all have different advantages over a restricted option.

I know a lot of people prefer different editors. But you can’t make it right for everyone and hope that the result still has the same quality compared to a little bit more restrictive and therefore more stable way of integrating features, especially the most basic ones. In a way, it’s like offering your client 10 different Web CMS to choose from: It’s cool to have a choice, but it’s a pain in the ass to maintain and the opposite of efficiency. And well, I’m a huge fan of K.I.S.S. by the way. :P