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# Software design considerations

These are assorted ramblings copy-pasted from various emails.

## About rich text editors

We have been struggling with rich text editors for a long time. To be honest, I do not think it was a good idea to add that many features to the rich text editor. Resizing images uploaded into a rich text editor is a real pain, and what if you’d like to reuse these images or display them using a lightbox script or something similar? You have to resort to writing loads of JavaScript code which will only work on one browser. You cannot really filter the HTML code generated by the user to kick out ugly HTML code generated by copy-pasting from word. The user will upload 10mb JPEGs and resize them to 50x50 pixels by himself.

All of this convinced me that offering the user a rich text editor with too much capabilities is a really bad idea. The rich text editor in FeinCMS only has bold, italic, bullets, link and headlines activated (and the HTML code button, because that’s sort of inevitable – sometimes the rich text editor messes up and you cannot fix it other than going directly into the HTML code. Plus, if someone really knows what he’s doing, I’d still like to give him the power to shot his own foot).

If this does not seem convincing you can always add your own rich text content type with a different configuration (or just override the rich text editor initialization template in your own project). We do not want to force our world view on you, it’s just that we think that in this case, more choice has the bigger potential to hurt than to help.

## Content blocks

Images and other media files are inserted via objects; the user can only select a file and a display mode (f.e. float/block for images or something...). A page’s content could look like this:

- Rich Text
- Floated image
- Rich Text
- YouTube Video Link, embedding code is automatically generated from the link
- Rich Text

It’s of course easier for the user to start with only a single rich text field, but I think that the user already has too much confusing possibilities with an enhanced rich text editor. Once the user grasps the concept of content blocks which can be freely added, removed and reordered using drag/drop, I’d say it’s much easier to administer the content of a webpage. Plus, the content blocks can have their own displaying and updating logic; implementing dynamic content inside the CMS is not hard anymore, on the contrary. Since content blocks are Django models, you can do anything you want inside them.

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