Though it seems like a minor tweak, swapping the What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor from the old system in favor of a better one was a long and perilous adventure.

It's all in the editor

The WYSIWYG editor of the current system is a decent little program called TinyMCE. We did not write it; instead, we grabbed it from the great farm of available open source software.

Sadly, we picked something rotten. It looked shiny and it smelled pleasant, but it was not edible. Unless you were starving. At the time we chose it we were famished.

The great limitations of it are known to all of our users: from the Bush Administration-type quality control that would re-write your content to the minuscule editing window on pages that used templates, TinyMCE clearly had its upbringing at the teat of Mussolini. Like Mussolini, we were lying when we said it made the trains run on time. We even had to go so far as to create "features" to work around the problems caused by TinyMCE. That "disable WYSIWYG editor" was so that our users would not have to suffer through it. TinyMCE brought a lot of heartache, and that was just the daily impact we would see on our support staff.

TinyMCE had to go. Under the new Salsa regime it was first against the wall. But first we needed a replacement. The new editor needed to:

• Generate really clean HTML.
  
• Be lightweight. (TinyMCE was a hog dipped in butter.)
  
• Clean out the crud that Microsoft Word generates.
  
• Be cross-browser compliant.