Is there ANY WAY to make WYSIWYG-editor to allow your own coding?

lilqhgal, I share your exasperation, but I think the particular example you cite falls into the realm of styling, not markup. Most clients want to edit their web pages as though they were Word documents, i.e. applying arbitrary styling at whim. Although there’s always the temptation to just throw up my hands and let them make a mess of my hard work, I do try to educate them instead. In your example, I would want to find out why the client wanted the extra vertical space at that location, express it as a rule, debate its value , see if there’s an existing style rule that would equally satisfy the client’s purpose and if not incorporate it into the style guide for the entire site and add the new rule to CSS and whatever necessary classes to the markup. That’s the ideal scenario in my view. It puts an admittedly aggravating hurdle in the way of the client mucking around with the look and feel of the website and helps them get their money’s worth out of the design job. The client gets a site that communicates their message and maintains its aesthetic and technical integrity.

That said, I agree completely about how frustrating TinyMCE is in second-guessing existing markup and imposing its own crappy rules. I’m torn between spending the time necessary to bend TinyMCE to my will (or to find out whether it’s sufficiently and specifically bendable) or writing my own damn editor.

There’s no way around it: web work is a technical pursuit. I know graphic designers who like to approach web design as a purely artistic endeavor. Page design in the abstract might be purely artistic, but web design, like print design, is also technical. A competent web designer can’t be ignorant of the rules of markup and styling any more than a competent architect can be ignorant of building techniques and materials. A corollary to this is that we can’t hand a website over to a non-technical client to edit until we have a visual editor that obeys the particular rules of each site’s structure, markup, and styling.

An alternative, as suggested above, is to separate content from markup and styling, but this ideal isn’t truly possible using WordPress unless you route all content through your own plugins with input fields that don’t permit styling and markup. If you’re going to go to that much work, it becomes questionable whether the WordPress engine remains a large enough share of the final product to justify its use.

Sorry to sound so negative — I’m using WordPress as a CMS and grumbling because it’s not what it was never intended to be. Mea culpa. I’m able to do really good work with WordPress but my pride is the pride of someone who’s managed through great effort to use a wrench to hammer in a screw.

Nice wrench, though!

Paul

Otto42, I have to agree with 1st angel. I’m an admin. I ad code in html view. If I (or any other user with sufficient priveleges) switches back into visual mode while editing the post, it strips the code that was entered via html mode.

to further complicate the discussion, even if we were to strip all the formatting from the visual editor with the exception of a few specified inline styles, we still have another major problem:

If, for example, I use the visual editor in firefox and save the post, I will get final post/page that displays differently than if I had used the visual editor and saved the post from within IE. I have tested this myself on FF/IE in both PC and Mac environments across a few different sites.

Just to clarify, I’m looking at the final page in both IE and FF afterward… Ie, I edit the page in FF, save, and refresh the output in FF. If I go into IE and edit the page, save, then go back to the output in FF and refresh, the page layout spacing changes.

wordpress is fantastic, but the issues that many people are having with the implementation of the editor (regardless of whether it’s wordpress or TinyMCE’s fault) is really, really irritating…. If I add up the time I’ve lost due to issues with the visual editor, it’s probably DAYS!

Is there no way to implement this better? At the very least, the documentation is sparse re: how wordpress implements TinyMCE and how to modify it’s behaviour.

You can add my previous post to this list:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/152057?replies=2

Where is the admin privilege that allows the insertion of raw code? The default is to use wpautop to rewrite code. That is in the core, and can’t be overridden by the wysiwyg editor.

I’m just adding my support to maisteriharju on the whole issue for the visual editor. After initial tinkering, WordPress had seemed to be the ideal solution for me to be able to deploy sites for clients with a built in CMS capability.

As I was initially doing my tinkering in HTML mode I did not appreciate the massive shortcomings of the visual editor. Initially I was pleased to see that such an interface was available but now, after trying to work around the stripping of the code, regardless of which mode you are in, & trying to gloss over the glaring ‘bugs’ as the clients see them, I am beginning to to think that my time would have been better spent just teaching my clients basic HTML.

I agree totally with ‘Juniper Webcraft’ that we should be incorporating as much of the possible required styling in css, but that is surely going to just leave all of these problems with the interface exactly as they are. I am having even basic paragraph tags removed, which doesn’t leave you with much faith of your styling being picked up anyway!

I have read a few moderator posts saying to stop moaning & just turn off the visual editor, but how crap a solution is that? I can see the potential for WordPress to be a fantastic & accessible solution for clients & people who aren’t interested in being as techie as most of us, but by shutting them out, or worse, scaring them away with what in their eyes looks like an unstable solution for their website, is just bad sense. It’s a huge problem I’m surprised WP are not taking more seriously.

Anyway, I have to go now, to write guidance notes for a client to walk them through basic functions in the visual editor & for how to avoid it all going wrong on them!

PS. The Advanced TinyMCE editor has improved the situation greatly, but not only is is not perfect, but I do not want to have to send out a site that relies on too many plugins for what should be basic functionality.

Any news on solutions in the pipeline in future releases? I have every faith in WordPress that the problem will be repaired beyond reproach & we can all go home for tea & medals & look back and laugh at all this.