WordPress WYSIWYG Editor is a Disaster
By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News NetworkSunday, September 3, 2006
I just had quite some experience using WordPress 2.x’s new WYSIWYG editor based on Tiny MCE, while publishing documentation for 3 column Anaconda Theme for WordPress. Two word summary of WYSIWYG editor: it sucks.
This new WYSIWYG is frustrating to use at every step of the way. It is buggy like the worst Microsoft products. The WYSIWYG mode isn’t properly synchronized with the HTML mode. Any changes made in the HTML mode may or may not get into the WYSIWYG mode. Often a change made in HTML mode isn’t idempotent. In other words if you make some change in HTML mode, then close the window and then go back to HTML mode, some of your change may be lost or worse modified.
Button implementations are buggy and insufficient. For example I cannot create a anchor tag with name or even a page (you can use my multi-page plugin for that). I needed to create anchor tags with name so I can redirect people from content section to other sections of the site in the same page. I switched to HTML code and created the code. When I switched back there were three tags created for each insertion. And worse it isn’t consistent. So for some it came out fine and others there were 2 duplicates.
It inserts innecessary tags and invalid tags and often stubbornly refuses to correct despite persistent efforts. For example my last section was coming out in all bold for some strange reason. In html mode I found that it created a strong tag without a corresponding end tag. I removed it and saved. The display way still the same and wrong. Repeated efforts to correct it were unsuccessful. In the end I switched over to non-GUI mode and hand corrected all the code.
I think the WordPress WYSIWYG mode is so buggy that it should be simply dropped. And definitely it shouldn’t be the default. It is bound to give a bad reputation to an otherwise reliable software.
Tags: Lost, Wordpress 2
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April 8, 2010: 8:01 pm
AGREED! I HATE THE WORDPRESS VISUAL POST EDITOR! If they want to do WYSIWYG they need to make sure I bloody well get what I bloody well see! Grrrrr….. |
 WP NEW User |
May 6, 2008: 1:18 pm
2008 now and it’s still BUGGY AS HELL!!!!!!!!!!!! My goodness!!! Should we have to wait until version 5 comes out till it’s stable? I bloody signed for 1 year already.. damnit!! I should have picked Typepad instead! |
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November 20, 2007: 2:09 pm
Problemi editor WYSIWYG di Wordpress… E’ ufficiale, l’ha detto anche l’ANSA delle 20.26: l’editor WYSIWYG di Wordpress fa cagare. Si potrebbe definire più che altro un editor WYSIC (What You See Is Crap). |
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January 5, 2007: 12:14 pm
I really would have to disagree. I think it’s really, surprisingly, great. I have used it quite a bit in Opera (well, it’s a little funny there, but…), and FireFox, where it works awesomely. Now, this may be a matter of expectations. I am looking for a system that my clients can use that is simple and pretty reliable, and it works really great for that. I wish it had tables, maybe a few other things, but I am really impressed, FWIW. I’ve done quite a bit of editing in it so far, and I am really amazed. Now, maybe my expectations are modified by a sense that getting any WYSIWYG application to work really well in a web page is still a little challenging. But I have been really surprised by how great it works! Sometimes I have to go into the HTML view, but that seems to work fine for me. |
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December 1, 2006: 10:31 am
[...] Wordpress 2.0 sucks. The WYSIWYG editor is terribly awfully horrendous, the image uploading system is craptastic, and I can’t really see any particular reason that I would stick with it. I am a big supporter of Wordpress, but I think I am going back to 1.5. [...] |
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September 4, 2006: 1:13 am
Yeah, I second that. It really DOES suck. That is why I delete the TinyMCE directory first from every fresh copy of Wordpress that I download from their site. I don’t need a WYSIWYG editor and I can certainly live without it! - MENJ |
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September 3, 2006: 11:46 pm
[...] Today I read Simple Thoughts’ review of this editor, who summed it up with the conclusive acknowledgment that it sucks: “This new WYSIWYG is frustrating to use at every step of the way. It is buggy like the worst Microsoft products. The WYSIWYG mode isn’t properly synchronized with the HTML mode… It inserts innecessary tags and invalid tags and often stubbornly refuses to correct despite persistent efforts.” [...] |
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September 3, 2006: 5:33 am
I know! I thought only those who use the Hebrew WP version had this problem, because I didn’t see it mentioned before. I switched to the regular non-rich editor but it’s horrible compared to rich editors, esp. when you’re writing Right-To-Left - all HTML codes are really messed up. I recently switched to writing the posts on Writely.Com which supports RTL & Hebrew very well, and then I copy the HTML code to the WP post editor. Is anybody using a different WYSISWYG editor for WP, perhaps one less buggy which is worth a try? Thanks for bringing this up. |
Lewis