Cornell Finch

Following my Dad mentioning it on his blog I thought I’d go and have a look at Chen Press.  The application is a plugin for Wordpress that replaces the default editor with fckeditor and gives many more options for post formatting.

To say the least it was a little difficult to locate on their website.  I quite simply couldn’t find it.  I searched through the Wordpress.org support forums and there were people complaining on there that they couldn’t find the download link either.  Okay, that really sucked.

So, this morning Dad emailed the version that he’d managed to download and I have installed it on here to try it out.  It’s installed and activated in the usual way (but not if you’re on wordpress.com!) with just one minor modification to do once you’ve FTPd the plugin to your server.  Nothing difficult, just moving a folder to the root of the website and changing the permissions.

Many users complain about the quality of the standard post editor within Wordpress and although this replacement will take some getting used to, I suspect that Chen Press will be a useful replacement for most users.

The clickable image on the left (opens in a new window) shows just some of the options available.  The toolbar looks very much like the standard Microsoft Word toolbar with text alignment, style and size tools, bullets, image editing options for thumbnail size, links to a full version and the bit I like most, an easy alignment for text wrapping option. 

Whilst I haven’t figured out what all the buttons do yet, certainly the image insert option was a bit of a pain in the arse.  I ended up using a mixture of the built in Wordpress image upload and the Chen Press editing options to get it to do exactly what I want it to.  I am sure that there’s an upload option in there somewhere, but it ain’t obvious to me at the moment!  The other thing I can’t see at the moment is an easy "block quote" option, I guess I can use the indent, but that won’t change the colour of the quoted text I don’t think.  Let’s see:

Block quote test example.  I am not convinced this is gonna work.  Is it a different colour?

Hmm, didn’t think so.  Okay, it worked!  Sweet! Overall, to me this seems to be a great tool for someone that likes lots of different coloured text, lots of bullets and easy text manipulation.  I don’t have a problem with the more limited functionality of the default WP editor so I think I’ll be sticking to that.  I’ll give Chen Press another couple of posts and see how I get on.  After All, it’s just a plugin that I can deactivate at any time!

It would be nice to see the image alignment, border and white space (padding) editing options for images to be built into wordpress though…