Although most of my blog posts are aimed at developers, this one is really for a content editor. When we build sites and do all the checks to make sure they work well for SEO and hit AAA accessibility standards, it's easy to forget that once we're done the content editors are going to take over with the ability to destroy things :) through the rich text editor.

Scenario

As a content editor you need to display some data in your article, and it makes most sense to put in a table.

Adding a table is actually quite straightforward in Sitecore, it's not much different to doing it in Microsoft Word. You click the insert table button and choose the size you want. However the problem that often gets missed is accessibility. While a table is actually very good for a screen reader, it does need to have a bit of info on things like table headings. e.g. are the they top row, the first column or do they exist at all.

Solution

Adding heading information takes a bit of extra work, but not a lot.

1. Add you table by clicking the Insert table button and choosing the size you want.

2. Fill in your tables content

3. Right click the table and select "Table Properties"

4. Go to the Accessibility tab and set the heading rows and columns. In this example I have set the first row and first column to be marked as headings.

5. Click on and your table will be updated. If your site has styles for table headings these will also show now too.

6. Switching to HTML view will also show the correct HTML tags now being used.

An alternative approach to this, is at step 1 to pick table wizard rather than picking the size of the table. This will open the same wizard as in step 4 and allow you to specify the size of the table here too.

When it comes to building a Sitecore site your first thought probably isn't that you are going to need to make any setting updates or customization's to the rich text editor. After all when you learn about building a site its mostly focused around creating components to add and remove from pages, but there are a couple of things that will greatly enhance your content editors experience.

Configure the toolbars

Out the box Sitecore ships with 4 toolbar configurations. These are defined in the core db here:

• /sitecore/system/Settings/Html Editor Profiles/Rich Text Default
• /sitecore/system/Settings/Html Editor Profiles/Rich Text Full
• /sitecore/system/Settings/Html Editor Profiles/Rich Text IDE
• /sitecore/system/Settings/Html Editor Profiles/Rich Text Medium

The "Rich Text Default" toolbar

The "Rich Text Full" toolbar

The "Rich Text IDE" toolbar

The "Rich Text Medium" toolbar

As the name suggests, by default your content editors will see the default toolbar that contains a very limited number of options. This may in-fact be to limited and you need to offer the content editors one of the toolbar's with more options. Equally, the full toolbar may give to many options such as font's and you would want to offer a more restricted set of options.

Setting a toolbar on a field

You can set a toolbar on each individual field by specifying the path in the template fields source field. This is particularly useful when a field needs specific options, such as a text area that should allow a user to configure bold, italics and links but shouldn't ever contain an image.

Updating the default toolbar for a rich text field

When you want to change the toolbar for all rich text fields, a better option is to update which toolbar is used by default. You can do this with a patch config file.

Updating the rich text editor CSS

A second way of customizing the rich text editor that you should consider is to make changes to the CSS file that the editor uses. By default this will use a CSS file called default.css that you will find in the root of the site. You can see this being referenced form a config setting if you look at the showconfig.aspx page.

You can change this to use a different CSS file using a patch config file as follows:

Now you may be wondering why you would want to do this, after all Sitecore offers an experience editor mode that will show the entire webpage as it will appear to visitors and also offers inline editing. However some aspects of a page can be better achieved using CSS styles rather than new components or new fields and content editor will need both an easy was to apply these style and a visual way to see that they have been applied, irrespective of if they are using the experience editor or the content editor.

For example, in this section of a blog post from Scott Hanselman he has highlighted some text as an aside which can easily be achieved in a rich text editor by applying a CSS class.

The first step to enabling this in Sitecore is to make sure you're using a toolbar that allows the user to select CSS classes (that's any but the default).

Next by creating a stylesheet that just contains the relevant style to be applied, the content editor can now select this in the CSS drop down;

The source field on a template definition is a great and easy way to enhance your content editors experience.

With fields types such as a tree list, this can be used to restrict the content tree to the section that is relevant. e.g.

Adding a source property like this:

Will change how a tree list displays from this:

To this:

Multi-Site Solutions

The source field however is far more powerful than just pasting in a fixed path to an item. Rather than a static path you can use xpath to make the results based on a query, such as restricting options on a droplink by template type.

In a multi-site solution this is particularly useful, by restricting the options to the site that your content item is on.

With a fixed path the best we could do in the above example would be to set the restriction to the nearest folder that could access both, resulting in a restriction like this:

While this makes some improvement for the user, but not hugely and they can still select content from the wrong site.

By using an xpath query that utilizes the ancestor-or-self function with a template name, the restriction will dynamically be based on navigating up the content tree from the current item until the template is found and then showing items from it or in this example going back down to the home item.

Resulting in an output like the original example, but dynamically changing to be the correct items for where the current content item is located: