Spice Up Your TextAreas!

Ever need to give a non-technical person the ability to add stuff to a website? But you don’t want to have to teach them FTP or HTML, and you don’t want them messing with your overall design anyway… so you build a back end that lets them add content. But maybe that’s not enough… they want to format their text a little. But you really don’t want to waste time teaching them HTML tags they’ll forget every week… and here’s why you won’t have to.

HTMLArea lets you replace your plaintext textareas with a nice, clean WYSIWYG box using only a few bits of javascript. Depending on what you do with it, you can add in a spellchecker, tables, a context menu, and even a full HTML page editor. I’ve mostly used just the basic version for my users, but it’s a godsend… the only thing it’s missing is the ability to upload images–you can add them in by URL, but not upload them. And it’s very easy to install… grab it and give it a shot! :-)

Oh, and here’s an example (just the basic core version).