The text editor

The text editor is deliberately simple. As text editors get ever more complex, this may come as a surprise. The reason for this is that there is a much quicker, more structured way to incorporate images and create complex layouts - section templates.

Let's say for example you want to create some content that has four images across the page, with a heading over and some text beneath each image, and perhaps some cute graphics to make it all hang together. This would be a nightmare to create using a text editor, and you would have to do this every time you wanted the same layout.

With section templates you create the layout for the section, add in some tags and the person editing the site just has to select the section template, click the tags to add images, text, links etc. and the job's done.

Paragraphs and line breaks

Pressing the return key will generate a new paragraph. A paragraph has extra spacing around it to make your content easier to read, and divides your content into logical chunks.

If you select a heading style (or bullets, indents etc.) for a section of text, the heading style will be applied to the whole of the selected paragraph.

Use paragraphs logically to break your text into readable chunks. Remember that reading text on-screen is hard on the eyes. Plenty of paragraph breaks make the text much easier to read.

Pressing shift + return will create a line break within the same paragraph without any extra line spacing.

Headings

Headings apply to the whole paragraph. The style of headings is set in the stylesheet using regular H1, H2 ... HTML tags.

The heading selector shows the headings as they appear in this part of the page. It is possible for the designer to make the headings appear differently in different places, for example a heading 1 in a sidebar will probably be in a smaller font than the same heading in the main content area.

Inline styles

Inline styles apply just to the selected text like this. Inline styles are created in the stylesheet by adding classes starting with 'inline_'.

Again, inline styles will appear in the inline style selector as they appear in this part of the page.

Mouse tips

Triple clicking will select the whole paragraph.