New editor is up!

I’m very excited to announce a very large upgrade that we have been working on for some time – the new editor toolbar for writing entries! I want to say many thanks to our Engineering team for their work on this, I think it makes the OD experience so much better!

If you go to write a new entry, you will see this toolbar right away, at the top of the editing space. There are some key things to know about this right away:

1. The toolbar is always there, and doesn’t require a right-click to launch (like the old toolbar) – so it shouldn’t interfere with Grammarly or other browser-based spellcheckers you might be using.
2. It supports a new Media Manager that will let you manage and re-use images that you upload into your diary – meaning, you can go back and add them to other entries, add captions to them, etc. – so you only have to upload once. (A note here – Engineering will be hooking up the feature image at the top of the page to this as well in the future, meaning those images will get saved there as well.
3. Speaking of images, the editor supports sizing and aligning of images in entries – so you can stretch or shrink your images, and you can right-align or left-align them with text wrapped around them if you like (this one I particularly like!).
4. Text colors are supported, as well as embedded links and emojis.
5. Also, special symbols, and paragraph level formatting for styles.
6. One that I really like is the button second from the right, which expands the editor to a full-screen mode, meaning you have the whole browser window to type in.
7. Also, also, make sure you click the last button on the right – that expands a second row of buttons for more functionality (like justification, undo, redo, etc.)
8. On that second row, there is a “Paste as text” button – for those of you who have had trouble pasting content from Word or elsewhere, try turning this off when you paste, it should solve your problem.
9. Also important – this editor supports single line-breaks (like you use when you are writing poetry) – just hit Shift+Enter to get a new single-spaced line.

There are a couple weird things with emoji that we are still working out, but please test this new editor out and let us know what you think!

For those of you interested in such things, this toolbar is using TinyMCE – which is an extensible web toolbar system. Obviously, our thanks to them for building a great product, and to our Engineers for integrating it and making it part of OD!