Wednesday, June 18, 2008
- Tim Wall
Today, HEATWAVE 2008 brings you a host of improvements to the built-in WYSIWYG editor on Water, Sky and LightCMS. This editor is used whenever you manage content on a text element, a blog post, or the detail page of a calendar event. The upgrades are now live across the system so you are free to explore. NOTE: if you see some messiness the first time you load the editor, you may need to refresh your browser to force a CSS reload.
Here's a quick look at what is new.
New image manager offers built-in crop, resize and more
The completely reworked, built-in image manager now offers a host of functionality that saves you from having to use external image editing software for most of your image editing needs. Simply open up the image manager, upload or select the image you want, and click the new "image editor" button and you'll see the screen below:
Your image is loaded to the left with controls on the right allowing you to change opacity, resize (with or without constraining proportions), flip or rotate, and crop your image. The editor then allows you to save the edited image back to the server as a new file which you can then quickly add to your page.
Other significant improvements to the image manager include:
- Use of internal dialog windows rather than browser-dependent windows. This offers more consistency of experience across browsers and avoids the "pop-up" blocker issues with previous controls. In fact, all dialog windows in the editor now use internal controls.
- The image manager now defaults to your previous location in the directory tree whenever you load it up so you don't have to continually drill down to a subfolder each time -- a nice time-saver.
- The "image map editor" icon has been removed from the toolbar to simplify and reduce clutter. Image map functionality is still available by right-clicking on any image and selecting the "image map editor" that way.
Cleaner, simpler default interface with new module manager
The user interface has been cleaned up and simplified by hiding some of the less-used controls, but still giving advanced users the ability to use them through the new module manager tool. The tag inspector, properties inspector and statistics bar, which previously appeared by default at the bottom of the editor, are now hidden by default, but you can bring them back if you wish. Just look for the new module manager icon 
on the top toolbar.
The new module manager also offers one new option not available before. Real-time HTML view will split your editor into two parts showing visual editing and HTML code at the same time and allowing you to quickly work on both views.
Oh, and one more thing. The editing window is now resizable. Just look for the handle at the lower right and you'll be able to drag to increase or decrease the size of your window. This is really helpful, especially when using the real-time HTML view. Of course, the full-screen mode is also still available (though its icon is now moved to the top toolbar).
Improved user experience across all browsers
The new editor has industry-leading cross browser compatibility. However, there are still some differences in the way the editor works across browsers. This is because rich-text editors always depend on the browser itself to provide some of the controls, and each browser handles these things somewhat differently. Let's take a look at the major browsers and what impro