While the TinyMCE editor that comes with Joomla is nice and provides everything needed for 99% of Joomla users, some of us need/want a little more.

Along comes the Joomla Content Editor or JCE:

To make it easier to see the differences, here is a screenshot of the TinyMCE editor:

Differences between TinyMCE and JCE

The Joomla Content Editor provides more functionality than TinyMCE and has many addon features.  A quick glance at the screenshots above shows a few additions:

• Show/Hide link to quickly go into No Editor mode.
• Undo/Redo functionality.
• Spellchecking.
• Preview.
• Edit Code view.
• Paste from Word.
• Paste as Plain Text.
• The ability to resize your editing area by dragging the bottom right corner.

There is a demo on the JCE site if you want to try it out yourself.

Installing JCE

One of the issues people (including myself) have with using JCE is that the installation can be a little confusing.  To help out, I will attempt to describe what needs to be done to get JCE up and running on your Joomla 1.5 site.

All Joomla editors require a plugin to be installed.  You can see the default plugins that come with Joomla by going to Extensions -> Plugin Manager:

To install JCE, you will need to install both a component and a plugin.  On the JCE website, you can go to Downloads -> Editor -> Joomla 1.5.x.  There are three files listed:

• com_jce_157.zip - JCE component.
• plg_jce_154.zip - JCE plugin.
• com_jce_157_154_package.zip - This package includes both the component and the plugin.

You can either install the one "package" file or install the component and plugin individually.  Once the component is installed, you can go to it through the Components -> JCE menu:

Once the plugin is installed, you can see it by going to Extensions -> Plugin Manager:

Once JCE is installed, you can set it to the default editor for all users by going to Site -> Global Configuration:

You can also set it as the default editor for an individual user by going to Site -> User Manager and editing an individual user: