Editor Roadmap / Known Issues

Okay — wanted to post about the state of the WYSIWYG editor, what we’re aware of, what we’re working on, and what we’ll be doing over the next week.

• By mid week, expect to see the full justify and the undo/redo option. Server side spell checking (which we don’t recommend using) will return by the end of the week. Again, spell checking wasn’t removed — all major browsers support this internally (with the exception of IE7, but Google toolbar provides spell checking there), and we wanted to shift people towards doing this. This decision was based on the lead of most other modern web applications today (see Google’s Knol) that assume spell checking is handled in the browser. In browser spell checking is more reliable, accurate, can use custom dictionaries, etc. For the other items, redo/undo is also handled by Control+Z in the interface, and full justify was moved to Fonts & Colors. Given the confusion, we’re going to revert to the way things were.

• We hope to have auto-saving for entry drafts in by the end of the week, which will fully remedy every situation where you could potentially lose a post due to a network timeout or internet issue.

• If you are having trouble uploading images, and you’re in a member account, make sure the member account actually has permission to upload images! We’re seeing a few bugs in the error messages describing this, but Squarespace is actually doing the right thing by blocking the upload. It’s just reporting it wrong.

• Some individuals expressed interest in the percentage based resizing feature — but we’re not sure why. When posting an image to your blog, the V4 interface required three steps: First, you add the image, then you calculate the right ratio to get the image to reduce properly, then you insert the image and actually see if the image looks right. We’ve brought that to one step. The preview is real-time (so you can see what it ACTUALLY looks like in the post), and you don’t have to do math to figure out how big the image should be. If your blog is 500px wide, you resize to 500 each time. This makes it much easier for very consistent looking pictures and thumbnails.

• To create a link on an image, the feature is in the “Additional Options” tab of the image editor. This is an improvement over V4, where it was impossible to tell if an image was linked properly or not. Now — you can be absolutely sure. If it’s in that area, it’s linked — otherwise it’s not.

• We’re aware of a bug where image alignment options appear to be getting cleared on load for older content in IE7 only. A patch for this is going live Monday evening.

• We’re aware of another bug in Firefox involving selecting an ENTIRE paragraph at once, or selecting multiple paragraphs and pressing the link button. Please just select less than the entire paragraph to sidestep this bug for the time being.

If you’re experiencing something that isn’t on this list — please write us immediately with some details on your issue (a so we can remedy things.

Update on Friday, August 15, 2008 at 03:56PM by A. Casalena

Had some feature creep on this. The changes listed are still queued, and we’re modeling things after what Google is doing in their editor across their product line.