Joomla includes two editors: TinyMCE and XStandard Lite. The default editor is TinyMCE, and it allows rich text content to be edited using on-screen fonts, styles (bold, italic, and so on), sizes, and so on. In this editor, an article will appear just as it does when it will be published to the site. XStandard Lite also offers WYSIWYG features, but also outputs XHTML- and strict HTML-compliant code for the article (which TinyMCE does not).

If no editor is selected as the default editor, all article editing will occur in plain text. Since Joomla is an HTML system, the plain text actually consists of the raw HTML code.

TinyMCE is an editor written in JavaScript that has been tested to work effectively on a variety of browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari), allows for XHTML 1.0 output, supports international language packs, and can even use various themes and plug-ins (including Flash). XStandard Lite, in contrast, is a compiled plug-in, which means that it is only available at present on Windows platforms. Aside from several feature advantages of XStandard, its binary execution gives it a great performance advantage over TinyMCE.

Although these editors ship with Joomla, they are not your only choices. In fact, there are more than a dozen optional editors available for downloading that are listed on the JED. The broad range of editors offers a variety of specialty features, including personal setting profiles for each user, source code for- matting, plug-in support, document management, style sheet editing, and numerous other options.

For example, you could add the JoomlaFCK extension, which has fewer features than TinyMCE or XStandard but is much smaller and quicker than the standard editors. The JoomlaFCK extension is based on the FCKeditor, which was created (appropriately enough) by Frederico Caldeira Knabben. It was one of the first browser-based editors that brought complete WYSIWYG functionality without requiring a client-side installation.

JoomlaFCK consists of a single plug-in that can be added to Joomla via the Extension Manager. One of the most useful (and unique) features of JoomlaFCK is the capability to use templates to provide a foundation to the article — similar to the way Microsoft Word has templates for resumes, presentations, and so on.