Technology Tales

Dean’s FCKEditor for WordPress plugin, a wish list

8th September 2008

I must admit that I have a liking for FCKEditor over and above what comes as standard with WordPress and the FCKEditor for WordPress plugin has been addressing my preference for a while now. However, its most recent release dates from last April and its integration with WordPress 2.6.x has been leaving a lot to be desired. In that vein, I have decided to collect a few of them here:

1. Automatic saves: the idea behind this feature of WordPress is that you aren’t hitting the save button that often at all. In fact, given that hitting save creates a revision and an extra record in your database, it really isn’t something that you should be doing very often anyway. Unless, you don’t mind a bloated database, it’s probably best to avoid that habit of saving every few minutes like I do when using Word.
2. Word count: this doesn’t update without saving a revision while it should update periodically in a manner akin to the automatic saves.
3. Insertion of media such as images: this is just broken and it takes away the possibility of having galleries and captions without manual work.

What I have above are the major inconsistencies but there have always been annoyances like the adding unwanted   entities allover the place, probably a habit of FCKEditor itself anyway. Nevertheless, it’s the integration work that really shows the lack of attention. Maybe, it’s time to move Dean Lee’s labour of love over to a fully community-maintained course of development. I know that it’s hard to see your “baby” leave you and take flight but I am inclined that it’s the best way forward when you considered how rapidly WordPress has been changing over the last year. Some moves have been made towards this but they really do need to go further.