We’ve recently added a WYSIWYG (“what-you-see-is-what-you-get”) editor (called TinyMCE) to most of the longer text fields. However, we must warn you:

Don’t use both Textile and TinyMCE !!

TinyMCE is for people that don’t want to deal with the hassle of learning Textile. It is a Javascript editing tool that makes it a little easier to write and format your posts. However, it outputs bare HTML, and adds a lot of extra tags. If you try to do certain Textile things inside this (like tables or lists, for example) the added HTML from TinyMCE will break the Textile formatting.

You can still make wiki links, like so:

[[:link-to-character]]
or
[[link to wiki page]]

If you want to use the new tool, edit your user profile and check the “use WYSIWYG editor” field. By default it’s turned off for old users (who are used to Textile) and turned on for new users (who are just joining the site).

This should be a campaign-wide decision!!

It will be a real pain for everyone if some of your players use TinyMCE and others use Textile. So, unless you want to be constantly reformatting, make sure that everyone is using the same thing.

This explains what just happened to me today. Is there an easy way to translate from one to the next? I’ve noticed that WYSIWYG is not quite as powerful (no tables without resorting to HTML for instance)

AFAIK, there is no easy conversion. The two different styles are for two different types of people. TinyMCE is for people who just want to get something working. Textile is for those who want maximum control (ie. power-users).

We could turn off one or the other, but we’re trying to service two very different classes of users.

I guess we could also look at doing something like MediaWiki (ie. Wikipedia). They have the helper-buttons at the top that will pre-format text for you. Everything would all still be Textile, but there would be a little help for people to learn how to do it.