Each Joomla editor has its pros and cons. Though We haven’t tried them all here at LDW, there are three that we use regularly. I will compare how JoomlaFCK, JCE and TinyMCE handle images, text, code and configuration.

Images:

FCK is my first choice as an image editor. It offers many options the other editors lacked. For instance, with FCK you can search/upload photos from your local machine to the server from within the WYSIWYG. Once uploaded you can search the server for an image and add it to your article. You can resize an image and preview the text wrap after the resize. And adding links to your photo is simple with FCK.

Tiny MCE has the slimmest layout. No extra options here: the editor does not allow you to load from your local machine, you can’t search the server, instead you must know a photo’s exact URL in order to display it. It’s clearly my last choice for images.

JCE has image preview and resizing options, and you’re able to search and upload for images from your local machine. JCE is comparable to FCK, but I find FCK more intuitive, plus it has a few more options.

Text:

JCE is my first choice for adding content and editing text. The icon layout is very clear and the default WYSIWYG offers all the tools that I usually need, omitting seldom-used ones. If there is something I need that JCE does not have there are additional plug-ins available as well.

Tiny MCE offers the clearest layout with no extras to get in your way. It offers no way to add from Word or add in plain text, but could be a great editor for people who are only adding text and who are not familiar with the other editors and their extras.

FCK offers template choices, background colors, spell check, emoticons, rows, columns, and much more. A very good choice for people familiar with Word and/or Open Office who would like to utilize tools such as tables, columns, rows and layout templates.

Source Code:

All of the editors offer an easy way to edit source—it’s a three-way tie.

So which is the best editor for clear, clean, standard compliant code? Sorry to say, this is an open source shortcoming. All the choices fall short of this goal. Out of the three editors, the worst one is Tiny MCE. The other two offer plain text and paste from Word options, and FCK also offers a blockquote button and some options to turn off auto-formatting, which helps with the code. As to which editor does the least damage, JCE and FCK are a toss-up.

Plug-in Configuration:

JCE offers many great configurations under components. You can choose to not let the editor clean up html It also uses gzip. The best thing is the plug-ins. You can enable and disable whichever plug-ins you want the editor to use, and even install new open source or proprietary plug-ins for JCE. The customization options seem endless. As a result, the user is able to create their preferred, most useful WYSIWYG. A+!

Tiny MCE is my second choice for configuration capabilities. It has many options for the buttons you do or don’t use, though even with all of them enabled, it’s still a slim editor. You can choose to clean code or not.

With FCK, what you see is truly what you get as far as configuration is concerned. I did find a couple of nice features: you can turn off auto-formatting for source code, and you can set default directories for your images.

Results, in a nutshell:

If you want to add some content, use JCE.

If you want to add an image, use FCK.