HTML WYSWIG compliment for PHP

[skiflyer]

OK... I've been doing PHP for a couple years now, and I've been more than happy to hand code all the HTML and CSS that goes with it.

But now, I'm just finding that I spend too much time getting everything to look pretty, and while I've been very successful on sites where the goal is usability, I'm falling a bit short on sites where the goal is presentation.

So all that said, does anyone know of a really nice WYSIWG editor I can use in conjunction with PHP.

To me, the specifications to use in conjuction are not related to a template engine... but rather, that I can make a mockup of the site I want... then save off just HTML&CSS&Javascript, and either easily hand-edit the results, or write PHP code to spit out the same code.

In other words, I don't want the output to be so convoluted that my only hope of making minor changes to the layout is to open the WYSIWG editor ala the output from saving a word document as HTML.

My best guess is DreamweaverMX 2004... but I don't have a ton of free time for evaulation, so I was hoping to get past the first round with some user input here.

 

[sleipnir214]

Have you thought about Zend Studio?


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[skiflyer]

Yeah I've toyed with it a bit... but never got too far into it.

What I'm looking for though is being able to drag and drop in images, draw boxes, add text and a table, and have it spit out some HTML and CSS that I can then work from.

I was under the impression that Zend Studio was more for the PHP code itself, debugging and stepping through and the like... perhaps I need to give it another run through.

 

[sleipnir214]

I dunno. I've never used DreamWeaver or Zend Studio. Although I have to tune a lot of niggling stuff by hand, a lot of the gross look-and-feel stuff can be handled by CSS.


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[Olavxxx]

I havent seen any wysiwyg editors yet, which are extremely good at images.

They have been good at other things, working as word, but when it comes to Images, I have yet to be impressed.

I'm also looking for a good WYSIWYG editor, which should not be too advanced, not too hard to implement, etc. As I will not be using it my self, but I will be including it as an option for supplied CMS systems I develop Custom for customers.

I think the image-part is one of the hardest things for "dumb users", as they might not be able to first upload the image in one place, then find it back.

I thought of this kind of gallery, where they can upload pictures, store reference in db, title, text, etc. and then just simply use some client-side crap, like javascript to parse out some <--img:30-->, which then would be replaced by <img src="path/to/image/retrieved/from/database.jpg" />

I will mark this with email notification, as this matter also applies to me.

Olav Alexander Mjelde

http://www.volvo-power.net

Admin & Webmaster

 

[ingresman]

I've not namo (namo.com) which I got off ebay for £15 including postage. It's ok and has lots of goodies like inbuilt ftp , site managment loads of cheesy javascript stuff. and you get the drag and drop stuff with very good accuracy.
I havn't really played with the php bits yes, it says it supports it but when you load it some code is doesn't syntax colour or like very nice.
The XML features look pretty good but again I've not had the time to sit down and tinker.

 

[Olavxxx]

ingresman: Is it hard to "bind" this to custom CMS?
eg. My cms has different fields in the SQL database:
text
title
etc etc

I guess the GUI just has to edit the text part, as the title can be made when generating pages.

If it is really good, I will buy one version too..
First, I want to see some demo of it, I'll check it out now.

Olav Alexander Mjelde

http://www.volvo-power.net

Admin & Webmaster

 

[Olavxxx]

Look at this one:

http://www.webstationone.com/test/htmlarea/index2.html

A modified htmlarea! free to download!
the image-part is o.k I guess.

Olav Alexander Mjelde

http://www.volvo-power.net

Admin & Webmaster

 

[ingresman]

amo is just an editor, I dont think you could bind it into a CMS, have a look at

http://www.namo.com

you can get a 30 day trial.
sometimes you just need to knock something out !

 

[LTeeple]

I have to say DWMX 2004 is a great tool.

'What I'm looking for though is being able to drag and drop in images, draw boxes, add text and a table, and have it spit out some HTML and CSS that I can then work from.'

It's an expensive tool, but it makes web development a dream. The downside is I've found that if you use DWMX2004's property box for setting attributes, the code it spits out won't pass validation using

http://validator.w3.org/

.

It's still a major timesaver though!


Cheers!
Laura

 

[Olavxxx]

DWMX 2k4 is the best of the CLIENTSIDE WYSIWYG editors, in my mind.

I however, want a web-based, interactive WYSIWYG editor.
This editor shall update databases, not flatfiles!

I think a modified htmlarea with additions will work.
(I still use SQL senteces for updating, lol.. it's a featre request)

Olav Alexander Mjelde

http://www.volvo-power.net

Admin & Webmaster