TinyMCE vs. Markdown

Get Started
1

I’m having a huge struggle with myself to decide between those 2 options for storing content.

As I see it:

Markdowns advantages:

  • Doesn’t store HTML (a very good thing IMO)
  • Clean formatting
  • Quick to learn and type
  • Portable (huge plus)

Markdowns disadvantages:

  • No good WYSIWYG
  • No asset manager (really want image management at least)
  • Parsed on page load (slower)

TinyMCE advantages:

  • Full featured WYSIWYG
  • Great asset manager
  • Plugin already written for Symfony
  • Dont need to parse on page load

TinyMCE disadvantages:

  • Stores HTML (more verbose, ugly? less portable)
  • Large Javascript download
  • Many image requests

OK, I’m glad I wrote those down - thought of a few more while listing them…

But I still cant quite decide. At the moment I’m leaning towards TinyMCE – the extra downloads wont matter because it will only be admins using it. Maybe I could even use Markdown for user-generated content.

Any opinions? How do you store your data?

2

I’ve been configuring TinyMCE for my current project and I am loving it. I need the ability to store HTML - which it does pretty cleanly now (not as clean as Editize, but better than anything else I’ve seen). It’s fast loading, though I do admit there are a fair amount of files you need to upload. I don’t have any experience with Markdown.

3

I am using TinyMCE, but it lacks the image uploading feature. I tried ibrowser, but it’s not working with Firefox 3. I might miss something, but spent more than 2 hours without any luck.

Is there any other image uploading plugin for tinyMCE?

4

I think the most important factor to consider is how comfortable the would-be admins are with markup vs. WYSIWYG. Other factor is that a HTML input field can lead to all kinds of exploits, so if you use TinyMCE you have to make sure you remove any unrecognized tags before storing the result.

5

I don’t know how easy to customise TinyMCE is, but if you’re concerned about multiple image requests, perhaps it would be possible to combine them into a single image and then use CSS sprites.

6

That’s how TinyMCE already works. All the icons and other UI widgets are in a single file.

7

The button that shows a photograph of a tree is used for inserting images. It works fine with FireFox3.

8

Well… I have use plugins: “ibrowser”, then add to theme_advanced_buttons3: “ibrowser” (tried with theme_advanced_buttons3_add too), but nothing appears. Are you on Mac or Windows?

9

If you don’t have the MCImageManager plugin for uploading images with TinyMCE, with clicking on this button you can only insert images that are already on a server.

To be able to upload images from your local computer you could write a custom plugin. There is a guide how to do this here.

I also have source code but it is not well documented that is why I didn’t post it here. If someone is interested in it write me a personal message.

Take care,
Elena

10