[Imc-alternatives] User Stories: Wikis or Wysiwygs?

[Dave Fregon]

On Tue, 2007-08-07 at 17:52 -0400, Aaron Kreider wrote:
> The user stories refer to "wikis".  I think we should use WYSIWYG (What 
> you see is what you get) editors instead.  For an example of WYSIWYG you 
> can see our openplans site and how you have the ability to change text 
> format by clicking on "B" and selecting text to make it bold.
> 
> Drupal has a module that does this: TinyMCE  
> (http://drupal.org/project/tinymce).
> 
> Drupal lets you choose multiple modes.  So you could have text, html and 
> wysiwyg and let users choose which one is their default.  I'd suggest 
> starting off regular users using wysiwyg as default.
> 
> Both wiki format and html codes are a little bit too complex and 
> unfamiliar for the average user. Whereas WYSIWYG imitates the most 
> familiar conventions that are used by word processing programs and other 
> software.
> 
> Do people agree with me on this? It'd be particularly useful to hear 
> from people who have experience in this area (mine is limited).  What do 
> regular (non-techie) users prefer?

ok I have to chime in here :)

WYSIWYG can be good and bad, it's finding the middle-ground.

Having handed out a lot of WYSIWYG sites, only to have 20 title colours
on one page, 3 font sizes and no consistency to a template provided, I
have to say that some things are good, others are EVIL :) making
something bold can be good, giving users the ability to make all the
text underlined and pink is not :) (nothing against pink, just not as
text;)

HTML is a medium that has limits, and when you get into this area, I
have found from a techie perspective you can spend a huge amount of
support time helping a user align tables and images in a wysiwyg editor,
because 'I can do it in word, why can't I cut and paste that in
here?' .. it adds to the work, and detracts from the work to be done as
well.

Depending on what it's being used for I guess .. and what the users have
exposure to actually do with it.

I have tended to fall back lately on larger projects I am doing to
defining a template, and have the user fill out plain text fields to
populate it. OR, limiting the WYSIWYG editor to only allowing certain
markup, and having the 'style' predefined in css (eg: headings) so they
don't 'break out' of the sites style.

my 2 cents, couldn't help it as WYSIWYG support gives us a lot of pain
at werk :)

Dave


> 
> Aaron
> 
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