Choosing on which forms to use a WYSIWYG editor

Published December 28th, 2010

This short guide describes how to configure several of the most popular WYSIWYG editors for Drupal to show only on forms where they are necessary, so they are available for site visitors, but don’t get in the way of administrative or site-building tasks.

If you have a WYSIWYG editor installed (such as the popular TinyMCE or FCKeditor, among others), it can potentially get in the way of the settings/configuration forms on many of Drupal’s administration pages (often inserting HTML code in places that break your settings). As such it is best to disable the WYSIWYG editor ahead of time for all areas of your site “except” for the content creation/publication pages where it is actually required. Though the process for doing this varies between editors, fortunately most include the means to allow you to choose whether they should be enabled or disabled for any given area of your site. It’s much better to choose the few places where the WYSIWYG editor “should” show up, rather than the countless places where it should “not”.

FCKeditor

1. FCKeditor is enabled by default on just about every text area on the site (not good). Go to Administer > Site configuration > FCKeditor and click the “edit” link next to FCKeditor Global Profile… (admin/settings/fckeditor/editg). Settings made here apply globally to all FCKeditor profiles, so you only have to make the settings one time.
2. Expand the “Visibility settings” fieldset. Change the Use inclusion or exclusion mode setting from exclude to include.
3. Select all of the text in the Fields to exclude/include box and delete it.
4. Move down to the currently-empty Paths to exclude/include box, and paste in the following:
   node/*
user/*
comment/*
5. You can add as many other paths as you need to, so that the WYSIWYG editor appears on only those pages.

TinyMCE

1. TinyMCE is already set by default to show up only on certain pages where it’s necessary. In case you’ve adjusted the default setting though, it can be changed by going to Administer > Site configuration > TinyMCE (admin/settings/tinymce) and then clicking on the “edit” link next to each of your profiles (TinyMCE does not have a global setting). Expand the “Visibility” fieldset in order to adjust the Show tinymce on specific pages setting.

Similar steps may be necessary for other WYSIWYG editors. Please refer to the documentation as well as the settings page of your WYSIWYG editor module.