2.4 Installing a Better Text Editor

The text editor that comes with Joomla is not very good. This is especially the case if you want to cut and paste articles which were originally written in MS Word. MS Word unfortunately tends to add a bunch of bad code that might ever crash your website. The solution to this problem is to get a better text editor which has a special WORD PASTE button to delete a bunch of the bad code. It is also important that the Editor have a SOURCE button which allows you to check to make sure bad code has been deleted. Finally, it is important to have an Editor which allows inline CSS – which is something we will be using to create our header and add background images. You will find all of these steps easier if you take the time now to download and install a better FREE text editor. We recommend the free JCK editor. It is currently the only editor which meets all of the concerns noted above. Here is the link to the Joomla Extension Directory:

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/edition/editors/90

Click on Download. Here is the Download link:

http://www.joomlackeditor.com/downloads

After downloading this PLUG IN to your computer, go to Extensions, Install and upload it to your website:

Then set it as your default editor by going to Site, User Manager. Edit:

Also, set it as default by going to Site, Global Configurations.

Then go to Article Manager and Click on New:

To insert a Word document into the editor, copy the Word Document and then click on the WORD PASTE ICON.

Then click on OK. This will place the Word text and formating into your Joomla article without all of the bad coding.

The following is what good coding looks like if you hit the source button:

And the following is what the coding would like like if you used the default Tiny MCE editor which does not use the WORD PASTE ICON and then hit the HTML (source) button:

This bad coding goes on for more than 100 lines and includes an “end if” statement which might cause your website to not load. Ironically, the browser which has the most trouble with this bad code is MS Internet Explorer!

If you already have pages made with the bad code, they can be fixed. Simply go to source view and delete everything after the opening paragraph tag <p> all the way down to the first <span>  or <class> tag which occurs just before the beginning of your actual article text.

Changing the Shift- Enter function

One small problem with the JCK Editor is that by default it inserts a new paragraph (2 lines) at every break. A more versatile option is to have it insert a single line break with Shift-Enter.

To change this, go to  Extensions, Plug-in Manager. Then find the Editor – Joomla CK Plug in and open it. This brings up the Plugin: [Edit] screen. On the right hand-side is a list of parameters. Navigate down to the Shift Enter Mode and click on the drop down combo box to change the element to BR Element (which stands for a single line break).

Click on 'Save' to save the new settings.

To learn more about all the configuration options available for the JCK editor, go to

http://www.joomlackeditor.com/tutorials

There are tutorials on this page which explain how to use every function in the Editor.

Now that we have a better editor, we are ready to add a better template which will allow us more complete control over the appearance of our website. That is the subject of the next article.