The Editor is Important - Modern WYSIWYG Editing

The Editor is ImportantCreating a quality author experience

Damien Fitzpatrick

Senior Director of Products, Ephox

Sources: http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all

The Content Explosion

41.7 million WordPress posts per

month

Producing 15.5 billion page views

From 409 million people

Sources: https://wordpress.com/about/, http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryEN.htm

3.1 million edits per month

32,500 editors

Over 9 billion page views

Creating Value with Content

–Jay Baer, author of Youtility

“The secret is not to do more…it’s to

create content that matters, that they

cherish since people crave useful things.”

gov.uk - Services and Info

Twilio - API Documentation

The editor’s environment is

important

Your editors highly trained, but self taught

This comes with a lot of baggage

They are creating valuable content with a purpose

The editing environment is the most important

productivity tool for achieving that purpose

Top 5 Editor Tips

1. Understand Your Editors

and Your ContentYou need to understand the users and the use case

Casual or professional contributors?

Technical or non-technical users?

Corporate site, email, blog or wiki?

Don’t just put any rich text editor in place

They’re all customisable

2. Bring It Together In the

Editor

Most content authors don’t understand

A Web Page = HTML + Scripts + CSS + Media

You need to ensure they don’t have to…

…without taking away the flexibility they want/need

Image Editing

Accessibility

Checking

Style Sheet

Classes

HTML Editing

Ephox’s EditLive! Editor

3. Don’t Expect Editors to

Understand MetadataAn important part of most

content systems

Great for processing

content

Too much can hinder

creation of content

Bad metadata can be

worse than none at all

4. Get The Basics Right

Using a rich text editor is an unconscious skill

Do not underestimate the importance of the keyboard

UX, reliable copy and paste, robust lists and tables,

spell checking

It doesn’t matter how many features the editor has if it

can’t get the Enter key right

When you’re evaluating an editor don’t just look at the

toolbar icons - write a document!

5. Less, But Better

So Now We’ve Solved

Editing…Right?

We’re Not Back Where We

WereMost web editors still lack

some basic capabilities

Spell checking

Reliable copy and

paste

Robust tables and lists

Image editing (or even

image copy and paste)

“Transparent” EditingVisual, Inplace, Inline or In-

context Editing

Blurs the lines between

reading and editing

Increasingly the focus for

content contribution

WordPress “Front-end

Editor” plugin in alpha

Limited opportunity to add

more than content

medium.com

Going Mobile

A challenge for adapting

our content

A huge challenge in

adapting rich text editors

HTML5 and Responsive

Design with CSS3 are

key

From the Desktop to the

Web

Word processing has moved to the web

Google Docs, Office 365, IBM Docs

Remains designed for the printed page

No “publishing”, your content is on their systems

Editing in the Cloud

A complete editing experience, with all its supporting

services, delivered through the cloud

Offers new editing possibilities

Image editing and management

Reusable content templates

Real time collaboration

Content portability

The Editor is Important

Damien Fitzpatrick

Ephox, Senior Director of Products

[email protected]