[support] How to insert links to other pages on the same site?

[Earl Miles]

cl at isbd.net wrote:
> I'm in a sort of 'in between' place.  As regards data entry I'd be
> happiest using vi (or a clone), it's what I use all day and every day
> at work.  What I was hoping for in Drupal (and similar CMS systems)
> was an easy way to create web page content, that doesn't *necessarily*
> mean a WYSIWYG editor.
> 
> In Drupal when you use TinyMCE it's not remotely WYSIWYG, it's
> basically an 'HTML pre-processor' but what is typed in the textarea
> doesn't really resemble what you'll see on your web page at all.

Personally I hate TinyMCE, so I have no defense for it. I don't use it, and I 
have trouble recommending it.

> I think what I was hoping for (but doesn't seem to exist yet) is
> something like the report creation part of Access, or the Forms in
> Access.  That isn't remotely WYSIWYG but it allows you to play about
> with the whole report/form in one window.  Exponent *attempts* to be a
> bit like this but fails because it (like Drupal) has modules and stuff
> which you can't change or even get at easily when you're editing
> content.

What you ask is actually a very difficult thing to do in a browser. It can be 
done, and there are sites out there that do it, but it requires some *very* 
good javascript programmers and a lot of time and knowledge. To my knowledge 
there really aren't tools like this in opensource, at least not in the basic 
browser context.

If that's what you want and/or expect, it isn't something you'll get, 
unfortunately. It's pretty easy to do at the OS layer when you have a lot of 
widgets and tools, but the browser is *very* limited it what it can present to 
you. Javascript can go an extra step and do a lot of it, but Javascript has 
browser compatability problems out the wazoo and the CSS required to place 
things accurately is tedious at best and outright impossible at worst.

> I know that the flavour of the moment is separating content from
> structure but when I'm designing a web page I want to be able to
> change both from somewhere near the same place.

It's not really the flavour of the moment; it's the reality of the tools we 
have available. Believe me, if wysiwyg were easy, there'd be a lot of it. 
People really want it, it's a very common scenario. Heck, if you could make web 
page editing like Word...well you can but you get really really crappy 
output...and you don't do it in the browser, you do it in Word.