This site is built using the content management system, Greymatter, of which I have written previously. The admin pages for Greymatter are great but for a novice offers little easy control over the look and feel of entries. This is where a very neat little control, HTMLArea comes in. This is a free control that gives the user a rich edit control allowing control over items such as fonts, colours, links and images making entering entries more like Word than Notepad. You can see the full range of functionality at the HTMLArea page.
So how do you include HTMLArea in the Greymatter admin pages? Follow the instructions below:
- Back up your existing configuration
- Download a copy of HTMLArea and upload to the same directory as the *.cgi files
- Download the updated version of gm-library.cgi here and copy to the correct directory on your server. Remember to change the extension to .cgi.
and that should be it. Login and when you add a new entry you should see the HTMLArea appear.
The only caveat to this is that HTMLArea requires Internet Explorer which will disappoint and infuriate the Firefox mob but if you don’t have IE you will simply see the text area like normal.