How can I make the most of the content editor?

When you create or edit discussion posts, blog posts, documents, and the like, you use the content editor built into Jive SBS. The editor includes many of the features you'll find in other word processing programs. Using its buttons and commands, you can format text to look as you want it to, embed images and video, insert links, and more.

This topic lists some of things you can do in the editor.

Note: Jive SBS has a special way to handle documents you create with Microsoft Office applications. For more information, be sure to see How can I work with Microsoft Office documents?

Using the Toolbar

The content editor's toolbar is pretty similar to what you'll see in many word processing programs. Use these tools to format text and images, video, and insert special formatting. The things you can do are described in more detail below.

Tip: Check out the tooltips! Each of the buttons on the toolbar displays its name when you hover your mouse pointer over the button for a second or two.

Checking Spelling

The editor includes a way to check spelling when you want to. Click the Toggle spellchecker button at the far right of the toolbar to check spelling for the content that's currently in the editor window. When it's on, mispelled words will be underlined with red lines.

Click a mispelled word to view suggested alternate spellings, then click the suggestion that matches what you want. Click outside the Suggestions list, somewhere else in the window, to make the list go away.

Click the Toggle spellchecker button to turn off the red lines. Note that the feature won't check spelling as you type. Click the button again to recheck spelling.

Note: You can change the language used for spellcheck by clicking the little down-pointing arrow at the right side of the Toggle spellcheck button.

Resizing the Main Window

You can change the size of the editor window by clicking the window's lower-right corner and dragging the corner up or down. (You can't make the window wider or narrower except by resizing the browser window itself, but you can make it taller or shorter.)

Viewing Content in HTML

As you're writing your content, the editor is behind the scenes creating HTML code so your content can be displayed in the web browser. If you're well-versed in HTML, you can create more ambitious formatting effects by editing that underlying HTML directly. You click the HTML link at the right of the toolbar to display the HTML markup; click Show Full Editor to go back.

Be careful with this feature, though. It's actually not all that difficult to mess up the way your content looks by incorrectly editing the HTML. If you're going to be doing a lot of editing this way, you might want to have a full-featured HTML editor handy. You can copy the generated HTML markup out of the content editor HTML window and paste it into your HTML editor while you work on it. When you're finished, copy the edited markup back into the content editor's HTML window.

Note: To help keep your content safe, there are a few HTML tags that will be ignored when the editor translates your content into something everyone can see. You can include them and they'll be saved, but they won't render when someone views your content. These tags include: <script>, <iframe>, <style>, <link>, and <meta>.

Formatting Text

Pretty much all of the basic formatting tools you see in word processors are available in the content editor.

Formatting Text

You can:

Make text bold, italic, underlined, and struck through. You can also make it particular color.
Change the typeface and size.
Apply a style, such as for headings.

To format particular characters, select the text in the editor, then click the button for the kind of formatting you want.

Inserting Links

You can insert links to sites on the web and to content in your community.

One way to start creating a link is to select the text you want people to click when they go to the place you're linking them to. You can also put your cursor anywhere, without selecting, then click the Insert Link button. If you do that, then the text people click will be the title of the community content or the URL to the external web site. Even after you insert the link, though, you can still change the text people see. In the editor, click inside the link text, then start deleting or typing to enter text you want.

When you want to link to community content, you can search for the item you want to link to or browse the list of content you've looked at lately. Click the item you want, then click Insert.

Note: Links to external web sites need to begin with "http://" or "https://", which indicate to the browser that you're linking to a web page. In other words, entering merely "www.example.com" won't work -- it needs to be "http://www.example.com".

Adding Emoticons

You can embed emoticons, which are little images you can use when text alone just isn't enough. Click the Emoticons button to see the list of images you can embed.

Embedding Images and Video

Have something to share that has to be seen? You can embed video and images so they appear amid the text of your content.

Inserting Images

You can embed images that are on your computer and images that are already uploaded to the community. You can also embed images that are on other web sites. When you click the Insert Image button, you'll be prompted to choose the image you wan to embed. For example, if you've already uploaded an image, you can select it on the Uploaded Images tab, then click Insert Image to embed it. To delete the image, click the red X at its corner.

Inserting Video

Embedding a video is just like embedding images. After you click the Insert Video button, you're prompted to choose the video you want to embed. You can embed from already uploaded video or from a video web site such as YouTube. For more, see How do I display video from the Web inside content?.

Also, if your community supports it, you can upload video you have, including video you've made yourself. For more information, see How do I upload and insert video belonging to my community?

Indenting and Aligning Text, Working with Lists

Some formatting effects larger blocks of text, such as paragraphs. That's what you're doing when you're making lists, indenting, or aligning.

Inserting Bulleted and Numbered Lists

You can create numbered or bulleted lists. One way to start is to type the items you want for your list, then select and format them (by clicking the list button you want). To remove the list formatting, select the list text, then click the list button you clicked to format it orginally.

If you want to make a list that has indented sub-lists, start by making your list, including a sub-item or two at the same level as the others. Then select the sub-items and click the indent button. You can also have sub-list items use a different character than their containing list -- such as letters instead of numbers. See the section below on list style for more.

You can set a list's display style, such as whether it uses numbers or letters for individual items. To set the style, select the list text you want to format, then right-click, point to List Style, and click the style you want. Here's a list of the available styles:

None -- Use nothing -- no numbers, letters or bullets.
Inherit -- Use the style that the containing list uses. This option is only available then the selected list item is a child of another list.
Decimal -- Use a number with a decimal after, such as "4."
Decimal with Leading Zero -- Use a number with a zero preceding, such as "04."
Upper Roman -- Use an upper-case roman numeral, such as "IV".
Lower Roman -- Use a lower-case roman numeral, such as "iv".
Upper Alpha -- Use an upper-case letter, such as "D".
Lower Alpha -- Use a lower-case letter, such as "d".
Lower Greek -- Use a lower-case Greek character.
Katakana, Katakana-Iroha, Hiragana, and Hiragana-Iroha are used in Japanese writing.
Cjk-Ideographic are used in Chinese writing.
Georgian is used in writing for the Georgian language.
Armenian is used in Armenian writing.
Hebrew is used in the Hebrew language.

Aligning Sections

You can align text in a paragraph left, right or center. You can also justify paragraph text so that both its left and right edges follow straight lines. To change alignment, simply put your cursor anywhere in the paragraph you want to format, then click the alignment button you want.

Indenting and Outdenting Sections

Indenting can be a handy feature to have. Of course, you can use it to call attention to blocks of text. But you can also indent items in a list to have them become part of a sub-list. To indent text, select the text you want, then click the Indent button. When you want to outdent in order to "undo" indenting, put your cursor in the section and click the Outdent button.

If you're indenting a paragraph because the text is quoted from somewhere else, keep in mind that the editor has a special way to handle quoted text. See that section for more information.

Working with Quoted Text and Code

Sometimes you want to call out sections of text (such as paragraphs) with different formatting.

Formatting Quoted Text

When you quote paragraphs of text you found somewhere else, such as in another person's post, it's a good idea to format it as quote text. That way, other people can easily see what's yours and what's someone else's.

When you format text as quoted, the published text will appear in a box that has grey shading.

Formatting Code

The editor provides special support for formatting text that's from languages used by programmers, or text that needs to look plain and unformatted. To apply the formatting described here, select the entire block of text you want to format, then click the Insert button and point to the formatting style you want. Note that these commands are intended for use with entire paragraphs, rather than just a few words. Trying to use these commands with a few words inside a paragraph will

Here's a list of what you can do:

Format text as plain -- like old-style typewriters made -- with the Plain command.
Use the SQL, XML, and Java commands to format your text so that its syntax is highlighted when then content is published.
If you're familiar with HTML, you can use the Insert Raw HTML command to add HTML markup that will be rendered when the content is published. In other words, if you insert <b>this is bold</b>, you'll get this is bold. This is a way to add simple HTML.

Working with Tables

Once you've got a table, you'll find that you can make a lot of the changes you want by right-clicking the table. When you right-click, you'll get a set of menu commands you can use to insert, remove, and change settings for rows, cells, and columns.

Adding or Deleting a Table

To add a table, put your cursor in the place where you want the table to appear, then click the Insert Table button. The editor will display a box where you can set your table's properties -- how many rows and columns, etc. You can also change these properties after you've created the table. To do that, right-click the table, then click Table properties.

Adding or Removing Rows and Columns

Right-click the table to view commands for adding and removing rows and columns. For example, if you want to insert a row between two rows, right-click the second row, point to Row, then click Insert row before.

Tip: A shortcut for adding rows to the bottom of your table is to use your computer's tab key. When you press tab, the editor advances the cursor from one cell to the next, then from the last cell in the row to the next row. When the cursor has reached the most lower-right cell, pressing the tab key creates a new row with the same numWhenber of cells as the preceding row.

Moving and Copying Rows and Columns

You move a row or column by cutting or copying it, then pasting it before or after another row or column to get it where you want it. For example right-click the row or column you want to move, point to Row, then click Cut table row. Next, right-click the row you want the first row to appear beneath, point to Row, then click Paste table row after.

Splitting and Merging Cells

You can merge two cells into one or split cells you've merged back into two. For example, to merge cells, select the cells you want to merge, right-click the table there, point to Cell, then click Merge table cells.

Adding a Table of Contents

The editor includes a feature that automatically generates a hierarchical table of contents based on the headings in your content. When you insert the table of contents in your content, the editor looks at the headings your content uses, including their levels (Heading 2, Heading 3, and so on). Based on the heading levels, the editor creates links to the headings, indenting the links at similar levels.

To insert the table of contents, click Insert, then click Table of Contents. While you're editing the content, the presence of the table of contents will appear as an icon like the following:

In the saved or published version of the content, the icon will be replaced with a hierarchical list of links to headings in your content.