Anybody clever enough to design a WYSIWYG template editor?

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) would be hard to do for templates as it’d have to constantly generate your template page. And if you’re talking never seeing code and just being able to drag around or whatever like FrontPage, well, there’s a reason those kinda programs are frowned upon. It’s impossible for them to generate clean code.

Much better to learn what you’re doing (take baby steps) and learn basic HTML and PHP. You don’t need to be able to make your own script/plugin to edit a template, just how things work, that’s all.

Oh man, you guys with your “why can’t people just learn to code properly” routine. I’ve been trying to set up a site in wordpress with a dial-up connection and it’s driving me nuts. I’ve spent hours and hours over the last few weeks trying to do this, meanwhile my head is full of all sorts of other stuff that takes up my time, I have a baby in the house that’s causing lot’s of lost sleep and now you guys are saying I should just drop everything and learn another language?

The slow connection means I often forget what I’m trying to sort out and I have such an old computer that I can’t use Firefox to have the instant view thing mentioned above.

I would just love a WYSIWYG editor. I am learning the code but I really don’t have time for it and won’t do for about say, twenty years.

I would love something that lets me choose columns, backgrounds, whatever links I like and groups of different links, search, archive etc and I can just place it instead of having to go through list hierarchies in the code and bumbling around on the keyboard till me eyes go red. The nearest thing I found was Blogspirit but it doesn’t have a search function and I can’t stop it from demanding email adresses when people want to post comments.

I thought the whole point of computers was that they can do whatever you ask them to – surely it’s not IMPOSSIBLE to make a WYSIWYG blog designer

BTW I’m not asking for sympathy just saying get real with your expectations about what people will do – coding is obviously your strength but it’s not for everyone.

You do have my sympathy… for the dial-up ??
OK, for testing, designing, trying out – I’d recommend to install XAMPP on your computer (from https://www.apachefriends.org/en/index.html ). Even being on a fast cable connection I use this to play with themes and design.
You can also go through the 300 or so themes to find the closest to your needs, and modify that one with less work.

Ia€?ve been away for a couple of days and remarkably, the first thing I see when I venture back into the WordPress support pages is this post. I gotta say that Ia€?m greatly surprised. I hadn’t realized that absolutism was the current flavor of the month…

“What makes me laugh are the millions of people who rely on WYSIWYG editors to build their sites, and never learning what goes into it behind the scenes. Then when something goes wrong with their site, they either cry about it in support forums, or abandon the site like a broken toy. Did you notice that when you search for something in Google and Yahoo! and you have to weed through tons of crap before finding what you need? Everyone and their grandmother has a stupid Web site.”

“A stupid web site?”

Carburetor, no offense, but when I read your comments the first thing that came to my mind was the billion or so other people who were faintly interested in WordPress as their choice of software for their “stupid web sites”. I wonder, now, if theya€?ll actually use the system.

While I understand (Ia€?m trying here, folksa€|) where youa€?re coming from a€“ I am an advocate of freedom of speech a€“ surely you must reconsider your choice of words?

Not everyone is a computer genus nor do they have the finances or desire to learn how to strip down a computer hard drive and put it back together just for the sake of it. Frankly, if EVERYONE did that, then a goodly proportion of IT personnel would suddenly find themselves out of a job and on government relief. This also applies to web designers and companies offering design services.

As to rubbishing WYSIWYG, let us not forget the era these so called owners of stupid websites were born. How old is YOUR grandmother? Or your mother for that matter? Or your nephew?

An 8yr old creating his first website using WYSIWYG is by far MORE INTELLIGENT than someone who professes vast knowledge of all things internet & computers, yet is adamantly opposed to sharing that information because a€“ god forbid a€“ the person soliciting the information used a WYSIWYG to build his/her website in the first place.

This 8yr old should be applauded for his creativity and courage. In fact, anyone who builds a website using whatever means available should likewise be applauded, especially when his/her background isna€?t related to computers or internet.

WYSIWYG does have a place in the internet playground, whether you wish it to be obliterated or not. It DOES serve a purpose, and as you kindly pointed out, for those unenlightened in all manner of computer, internet, coding and other crap that floods our internet today. Oh, did I actually forget to use capital letters on that? OURS. For everyone, great and small, genus or stupid. As to the crap that floats around the interneta€|

a€?I hope we reach the point with Web Standards where all those millions of sites get dissolved and cease to exist, rejected from every current browser. But now we want easy-to-build WordPress blogs so millions of idiots can create templates and blogs and get bored with them and leave them floating around in cyberspace to annoy the rest of us.a€?

Millions of idiots? Wow. Again Ia€?m blown away with your factual statements. So, you know these idiots personally? Youa€?ve seen and read their websites, each and every one of them? I take it their content doesna€?t measure up against yours? What, exactly, constitutes as an idiot in your eyes?

Ia€?m not here to rag on you personally, but as a person who hasna€?t stripped down a computer hard drive (nor am I EVER likely to do so) I built my first website using WYSIWYG and I make NO apologies for it. At the time I didna€?t know ANYTHING about website creation or how the internet worked or anything about compliance issues or standards or browsers and the like nor was I in a position to actually employ some web design company to build something I wanted to create.

I know damn well Ia€?m NOT STUPID nor is my website remotely crappy. I know for a FACT that my content isna€?t remotely like yours, but does that automatically label my website crappy and stupid?

Ia€?d like you to consider, for just one moment, some of those crappy websites you seem to think choke YOUR internet that perhaps the owner is no longer in a position to fix or update the original site. Perhaps the owner has passed on, and relatives want to have something visual to remind them of him/her? Perhaps the owner doesna€?t have the resources or time to fix things because other important issues come first so the website remains relatively unchanged.

There is life after websites a€“ Ia€?ve stated that at the beginning of this post. Ia€?ve been away living my life, perhaps you need a holiday too?

Last point, for those so violently opposed to helping people who had the misfortune of building their website using a WYSIWYG, perhaps you should consider that the fault lies with you. Sharing information to promote better web standards and compliance stems from, well, sharing information.

There isna€?t one single person on the face of the earth who was born with this ceaseless evolution of knowledge. Knowledge, like tolerance and acceptance, is a learned behavior.

Ah…. he did apologize for his outburst….

I will say, about helping someone who’s used wysiwyg to build a site – it’s difficult and painful. Since this is what I do for money, I feel uniquely qualified to so state.

I did start with a wysiwyg – a now defunct one, which as I look back at the first site I ever built (in 1992 appx., I’m the queen of redundant backups….), I realize that wysiwyg editor did a darn good job, unlike some, and very expensive ones at that, out there – it didn’t throw crap code, for one thing, and were it still in dev, I might even be still using it.

Then again, had it not fallen by the wayside, I’d never have learned the nuts and bolts of css etc. so I doubt I’d be making any money doing what I’m doing.

All things happen for a reason I guess….

[And yes, before anyone bothers to remind me, I did and do agree with some of the things carburetor posted in his first post on this thread – such as learning those nuts and bolts, leaving the 12 year old out of it.]

I understand that he apologised for some of his comments, hence why I stated that I wasn’t personally ragging on him. However having a belief that EVERYONE should know how things work before asking ANY help question is, in essence, a form of absolutism.

I don’t know how my television works or my microwave, either, come to think about it, other than plug and play. I don’t want to know how they work because that type of learning doesn’t interest me.

If and when something goes wrong, that’s what the repair guy is for. Employment opportunities are boundless.

I’ve thought of this. In August I started a splogspot blog and used that to teach myself HTML and CSS. Now I switch to WP and all of the sudden I need to know the basics of PHP, FTP, XML, all that stuff. I really enjoy it, but it takes months to learn it all.

At the beginning it would have been nice to have a handy-dandy WYSIWYG editor to take me through the steps

Here’s a possible alternative to bloating wp with an in-built wysiwyg:

https://xstandard.com/

ugh, lets get back on track.

I think the original poster just wants to make a cool wordpress site that he wants to design. Correct?

I agree with the posters about a WYS. theme editor is a bad way to go. I learned by studying the kubrick theme then looked a bunch of other themes and tried to understand why they did their design a certain way.

I think of wordpress and a kick ass lego set. You just need to learn how to add modules and see how things are done.
Plus on another topic, design is only part of a succesful website. Content and communicating is far more important than the theme that is being used.

I assume carb uses vi to post to his blog? ??

deleted.

what about <template_tag> aware code editor for WP syntax highlighting? Aren’t them some editors out there that will allow you to import highlight files? Has anyone done this?

Will

Content is the most important thing but having a good theme and color scheme is still a very good thing to have. It’s like cooking a gourmet meal. Do you want to serve it on paper plates or fine china?