I am seriously frustrated with the TinyMCE editor, which I had installed on my allergy information site.

I came across a few short-comings, and I don’t think I can live with either of them.

Firstly, it messes up the HTML. I had painstakingly formatted some content, so that there was a list of items on one side, and a Google ad on the other. In order to prevent content above and below from wrapping around the arrangement, I needed to insert a couple of <DIV style=”clear: both;”></DIV> statements. TinyMCE stripped out both tags. I was kind of expecting that, so I did a preview before committing some other changes I had made. I didn’t save the changes due to the loss of the tags.

Much worse happened some time later. After spending quite a while on typing up some content, I clicked on a link in the content to edit the link. Instead of selecting the link, TinyMCE sent me to the link. When I pressed the back button, my changes were lost! That’s when I removed TinyMCE from my system. It won’t be coming back. I’d rather type out raw HTML then have that happen again!

A third shortcoming is that I can’t have a full-featured version of the editor for stories, and a stripped-down version for comments. This is likely the fault of how it is implemented in Drupal, than the editor itself. What I want though, is a way for visitors to do a little formatting of comments, and for me to do a lot of formatting of articles.

I will be investigating other editors when I have time. I will post again when I have had a chance to check out a few.

What editor do you use? If you want to share, do leave a comment!