Editing with Editize

I have just found a cool content management tool: Editize from SitePoint. Editize is an applet that provides a full WYSIWYG editing interface that you can add to a Web form – in effect, it replaces HTML s with a configurable text editor.

I have just found a cool content management tool: Editize from SitePoint. Editize is an applet that provides a full WYSIWYG editing interface that you can add to a Web form – in effect, it replaces HTML s with a configurable text editor.

By “configurable” I mean that Editize can be set up so that what the user can do while editing is limited as needed. Any of the following editing features can be enabled or disabled:

*Paragraph styles.

*Paragraph alignment.

*Bulleted or numbered lists.

*Bold, italic, and underlined text.

*Configurable highlighted text color for key words and phrases.

*Inline code display in technical articles in a monospaced font.

*Hyperlinks (with preconfigurable URLs).

*Images.

*Tables.

For advanced users the code view interface can also be enabled. Editize offers more-or-less unlimited multilevel undo/redo and there’s also full clipboard support, which preserves supported text formatting.

This amount of control and customizability makes Editize a great editing interface for naive users.

What’s really neat about this tool is that the applet returns data through the form when the submit button is pressed – this is actually more complicated than you might first think.

What actually happens to the data returned from a form using an Editize field is up to the programmer. It can be sent to a Web page, to a database, or sent as an e-mail message – whatever the Web application receiving the data wants to do with it.

Server-side APIs that dynamically output all of the HTML and JavaScript code needed to place Editize on a page are supplied for PHP, ASP and ASP.NET. And for server-side languages such as ASP.NET, JSP and Cold Fusion that support XML the Editize code is supplied as XML tags.

And if you rely on an unsupported server-side language or if you have no server-side processing available, the all purpose interface – a JavaScript API – will allow Editize to work on any Web development platform. The company refers to this as the “API of last resort.”

A free version is available for use on a single local machine and 30-day demos are available for a server identified by either a specific IP address or domain name. Pricing is very reasonable at $149 for a single Web site license, which allows unlimited subdomains, unlimited end-users, unlimited web applications and unlimited platforms. Volume pricing is also available.