Text Editor Improvements

Writing in the DM2 text editor used to be cumbersome and borderline frustrating. Well, you can relax now. The text editor in DM2 has undergone several improvements in the past few weeks, courtesy of our hard-working programmers here at Epicenter. Working in the new DM2 text editor is refreshingly efficient and simple.

The first thing you’ll notice is the toolbar, where clickable buttons have replaced some of the drop-down menus. Now all you need to do is highlight text and click the corresponding buttons to make headers, bolded text, italics, paragraph formatting and other simple changes. The toolbar interface is similar to what you’d find in popular word-processing software.

Moving right across the toolbar, you’ll find two buttons for making ordered and unordered lists. Just highlight the text you want to make into a list, then click the button for the list format you prefer. If you’re making a bulleted list and you want some spacing between your listed items, just highlight one item at a time and click the unordered list button for each item.

The color palette button allows you to change the color of text in your content. To the right of the palette button, the eraser icon allows you to remove all formatting from highlighted text. The eraser is very useful when playing around with different design ideas. Next you’ll find buttons for indenting our outdenting text – a useful feature when trying to draw attention to a block of text – followed by the horizontal rule button, which creates a solid line across your content field.

The next two buttons resemble chain links. The left button is for inserting hyperlinks into your copy. Click this button, and a new interface appears that lets you manage your hyperlink without leaving the text editor. Either select the page you would like to link to, or enter the desired destination in the “url” text field. Then you can designate whether you would like your hyperlink’s destination to open in a new window or in the user’s existing browser. When you’re finished, click the “update” button on the left side of the toolbar to complete your hyperlink. If you want to remove the link, simply highlight your hyperlinked text and click on the other chain link button – the one that depicts a chain being broken. This erases the link.

The process for inserting photos and contextual ads hasn’t really changed, although the interface has been changed slightly to match the other new features of the DM2 editors. To the right of those buttons, you’ll see two new features for adding tables and style blocks into your copy. These are pretty easy to figure out, as the toolbar interfaces allow you to change the border, width, height, cellpadding and cellspacing of these elements.

Last but not least is my favorite change to the DM2 editor – the ability to check the font and size of your copy. This may seem like a simple thing, but now it’s much easier to add new content to your site that matches any pre-existing content.

We’ll continue to keep you abreast on any new improvements to the DM2 system. For now, enjoy the new changes to the text editor. We’re confident you’ll find the new-and-improved editor as useful as we have.