Can you suggest a Non-HTML WYSIWYG web editor?

Question

I am scouting the market for a good WYSIWYG editor. My users are going to write stuff just like I'm doing now on Stack Overflow, but they aren't as tech-savvy as the SO users, so I need a WYSIWYG editor instead of this Markdown editor.

Feature-wise, I'd like the editor to have approximately the same features as the buttons that this editor has, i.e. bold/italic/links/quotes/lists(numbered/bulleted)/headings. More features are of course interesting.

I'd like the editor not to save in HTML, but instead use some other format, like BBCode or Markdown. This is since I want to minimize the probability of our users injecting scripts or any other nastiness into our database.

There is a lot of different WYSIWYG editors out there, like FCKeditor, TinyMCE etc etc, but unfortunately most of them save in HTML.

TinyMCE has a BBCode mode, though, but I read that TinyMCE is kind of bloated. I stumbled upon a Markdown WYSIWYG project which seems to be more or less dead.

Do you have any other recommendations?

It's a plus if the editor is built on jQuery.

Eleneeleni

Answer 1

As I said in this answer:

Pen is a new (active as of 2014) WYSIWYG editor that outputs Markdown.
It's not perfect—I've had issues with pasting HTML there—but it works.

Dictate

Woow! After days of googling around I didn't find this editor - thank you very much! – Arpent

Amazing just what i was looking for – Nitrosamine

Answer 2

You should check out MarkItUp (http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/home/). It is built on jQuery and has support for various markup syntaxes (Markdown, wiki, BBcode, etc). Also, I believe it is fairly lightweight (at least more so than tinyMCE or FCKeditor).

Gravelblind

That also what I'm using on my site, with bbCode, seems to work well so far, although it does intercept certain ctrl+<key> combo's that some people use for navigation of the page. Also haven't figured out a way to let people tab into the box without having to first tab through all of the buttons. – Irretentive

This doesn't seem to be WYSIWYG, which the author was asking for. – Chert

Answer 3

wysiwyg bbcode (free & open source)

Munger

Answer 4

You should look following,

wysihat is clean and fresh start and supported by design savvy company :-)

http://github.com/37signals/wysihat/tree/master

Dives

Answer 5

Maybe this list of lightweight markup languages might help you in your search.

Creole engine support
MediaWIKI Editor
Textile
Texy! Playground
txt2tags online

Some of these have tools and some only have online demos, it all depends on the community and how far along the project is.

Silicle

Well, could you accompany the list with which editors support which lightweight language, I'd be happy. – Sekyere

Thanks for your effort, but so far, none of those links were to WYSIWYG editors, but markup textboxes that generate html, which isn't good enough, I'm afraid. My users would not love to write adhering to the textile syntax. – Sekyere

Answer 6

Alternatively, save in HTML, and then purify the data before sending it to your database.

Induct

Just to be aware, there are known exploits against html purifier, and there may be more. Using HTML as your base language for embedding user-provided content is inherently dangerous. cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-6852/… – Dupery

Answer 7

Have you considered using a web-based editor or even a content management system for this? There are a number of CMSs/wikis with decent, safe web page editors. Drupal, Plone and Atlassian Confluence are first to come to my mind.

Ervin