Setting The WYSIWYG Editor To Basic Mode

John Gunther — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:48:03 +0000

Bronto’s WYSIWYG editor is a fantastic way to create and design your messages without having to deal with HTML and CSS. Our WYSIWYG editor is packed full of buttons that allow you to easily do just about anything you want in order to create your message. Sometimes though, you don’t need or want all the bells and whistles that come with the WYSIWYG editor by default. Perhaps you have a new user and you want to ease them into creating messages, or maybe you simply want to limit what a user can do with the WYSIWYG editor. Whatever your reason, this post will show you how to set the WYSIWYG editor to basic mode for a given user.

What Does The WYSIWYG Editor Look Like In Basic Mode?

You can think of the WYSIWYG editor in basic mode as being a stripped down version of the editor in default mode. Below is a screen shot that compares the WYSIWYG editor in the basic and default modes.

The WYSIWYG editor toolbar in basic mode provides buttons for basic text editing, spell checking, and tag addition. You’ll notice that many of the more advanced buttons, such as adding images, copy/paste options, and dynamic content are not included.

How To Enable The Basic WYSIWYG Editor For A User

You can enable the Basic WYSIWYG editor on a per user basis.

To enable the basic WYSIWYG editor for a user:

Go to Home->Users.
Click on the name of the user you want to enable the basic WYSIWYG editor for.
Click Edit Permissions.
Click Messages.
Click the Use of a basic editor rather than the full What-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor check box.
Click Save.

Bronto’s WYSIWYG editor is a powerful tool, but it’s not for everyone. If you’ve got a user who doesn’t need all of the buttons contained in the default WYSIWYG editor, use the steps above to limit what they can do.

John Gunther
Technical Writer/eLearning Specialist at Bronto
Editor of Brontoversity

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Use Simple CSS To Create Links That Never Go Out Of Style

Brad Gurley — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:31:21 +0000

Since the dawn of time (or sometime in the early 90s), internet hyperlinks have had two unmistakable characteristics: blue text and underlines. In the early days of web surfing, this formatting made it easier to immediately spot hyperlinks and to determine what text in a page was clickable. Then, on one fateful day, some crafty web designer decided to start making hyperlinks different colors. Yet another web designer wanted to – gasp! – remove the underline, and still others after them wanted to make all sorts of changes to the way those familiar web links looked and behaved.

Today, it’s extremely common to see hyperlinks within a webpage that are any color but blue. Some are underlined, some aren’t. Some even have flashy mouseover effects.

“That’s all well and good,” you might be thinking, “but what about my email messages?” Well, you can rest easy: you can also change the style of your email links using inline cascading style sheets, or CSS.

Applying Styles To A Link In Bronto

Before you get started, it’s important to remember that not all email clients will honor link colors set within your message. That’s right: some subscribers will still see the default link color and style for their particular email client. With that in mind, it’s a good idea to avoid using colored backgrounds that might hide your links if the default styles are displayed (stay away from those electric blue backgrounds!)

Let’s say you’re editing a message in Bronto, and you want your readers to click on the text “Check out our latest specials here.” You’d like the text to be green with no underline. You can do that by specifying the text-decoration and color attributes for your link. Here’s how it’s done:

Step 1:

Click and drag over the desired text to select it.

Step 2:

Click the Insert/edit a link icon in the WYSIWYG editor toolbar.

Step 3:

A pop-up box will appear with link options. Type the desired target in the Link URL field.

Step 4:

The Style field is where you will enter your CSS data. We’ll use the text-decoration value to remove the underline, and the color value to change our link to green.

Be sure to enter the punctuation just as you see above.

The value text-decoration: none; removes the underline from the text, and color: #009900 changes the text color to green. #009900 is the hex color code for the specific green we chose; you can find hex codes for your desired color via a number of free resources available on the web.

Step 5:

Click the Insert button to insert the link into your message.

Step 6:

You may notice that the link is still blue and underlined in the edit window. Click the Preview button to see how the link looks with the styles applied.

Step 7:

Click Save and Close.

You now have a link that reflects your own style!

As always, if you have any questions about link styles, feel free to post in the comments or to open a case from the Support link within your account.

Brad Gurley
Support Associate at Bronto

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