Best Practices: Content/text editor

Table of Contents

Paragraph format

Paragraph style

Formatting

Indent

Lists

Insert image

Insert video

Insert table

Insert link

Anchor link

Insert horizontal line

Embed

Emoji picker

Writing assistant

With each type of content (pages, events and albums) published on Simpplr, you're offered a content editor bar. It looks like this...
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Below we'll break down what each component of the editor does, as well as some best practices we've seen customers put in place using the editor. The text editor wiki article goes into more information on each component of the editor.

Paragraph format

With the Paragraph format button, you're able to highlight whatever text you want, and assign it as any size heading within your content, normal text, or code view text.
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Paragraph style

The Paragraph style button lets you take text and format it into different styles that may be beneficial depending on the text. You can choose to create a callout box on the left, right, or center of the screen. This will emphasize the highlighted text to stand out within the content.

A lot of customer will insert a callout box to some particularly important text they want their readers to know. New

Adding a callout box will result in something like this:
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You're also able to make text into a standout quote with the Paragraph style.

Formatting

The formatting options include bolditalicizeunderline, and strikethrough text. The clear formatting icon  in the More (...) section allows you to clear the formatting of any selected text. 

Color

The color icon lets you change the text color of whatever's highlighted. You can also change the content's background color, though this won't appear until you save the content and review it or publish it. 

Indent

The indent button allows you to increase or decrease the indent at the start of a paragraph.
New indent content editor.gif

Lists

Similar to a Word document, you can add numbered or bulleted lists to your content using these options. 

Insert image

This button lets you add images from your computer or from the site files on the site you're posting the content to. For example, we're posting content onto the Information Technology site, so you can add an image that's already saved in the Information Technology site files.

You also have the option of adding an image from a 3rd party url. This may be useful if your org has images stored on a file hosting site outside of Simpplr.

 

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Any image added here will automatically be added to the site's Content files folder. 

Insert video

The Insert video button allows you to paste a video URL from a video hosting website such as YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, and more. You can paste the URL or embed code from the video to make the video inline with the content.

If you have Simpplr Native Video enabled on your instance, you can also use this button to upload a video from your computer. 

Insert table

This button allows you to create and add a table to your content. You set the required dimensions, and Simpplr does the rest. Simpplr limits the tables to 10x10 in order to make for a better mobile user experience.

If you want to show more data in a table, we recommend attaching a spreadsheet to your content.
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Style your table with the table editor. Here, you can add a header for your table in the top row, color certain text or cells to highlight data points, and even style the boarders by making them dashed or removing them completely.Remove

Insert link

Here you can add a link to your content. This can be any URL you'd like. Add the link, then choose what the text should say that users will click. Once added, you'll be able to open, edit or unlink the link.

Anchor link

An anchor tag, or anchor link, links to another location on the same page. They are typically used for long or text-heavy pages so that visitors can jump to a specific part of the page without having to scroll as much.

  • When there is a heading is added in the content, on focus of the heading the copy link option will be shown

  • This link can be copied and used as to anchor to this location from anywhere in the content

To add an anchor link:

  1. Scroll to the right side of the content body to open the 'Copy link to heading' modal. Click.

    text editor anchor links.png

  2. Open the Link icon at the top of the editor. In the Text field, put the text that will display when users click the anchor link. In the Link filed, paste what you just copied from step 1. Click Update.anchor links 2.png

Whenever a header is deleted after being used as a anchor link, the link will also be automatically removed.

Insert horizontal line

This button adds a line to the spot of your cursor. This is useful for breaking up text throughout your content.
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Embed

The embed option allows you to embed content or widgets from 3rd party urls either directly through a url or a code editor, where you can paste iframes. A great use case for this is embedding things like Google Docs, Sheets or Forms to make for easily accessible, interactive items in your content. Note, users must have access to the document in question if pasted from Google or a similar 3rd party source in order to see it in the Simpplr page.  New

 

Simpplr does not support custom CSS. There is also currently no code view that allows you to insert your own custom HTML in line with the content, though this is an expected addition later in 2023. 

Emoji picker

Finally, in the ... section,  there's our Emoji picker. As you can guess, this allows you to add emojis to your content. We offer hundreds of emojis that you can browse through or search for. The settings icon lets you choose a default skin tone for character emojis as well.New

Writing assistant

The newest addition to the Simpplr content editor is our Writing assistant. Powered by generative AI, the Writing assistant is designed to get your content in the most precise language it can be to effectively communicate purpose, goals and tone of what's being said. 

To be clear, this is NOT meant to be a replacement to your writing or communication; rather, it's designed to take your message and align it with the overall goals and expectations of your company. 

For full in-depth documentation on the Writing assistant, click here.

With the assistant, you can enter the prompt, for example, "I want to share a new Work From Home policy with my team." Then decide which (if any) company values you want to attribute with your content, set the tone, overall content format and intent, then generate. generate

In a few moments, the AI will return information based on your prompt. You can refresh the content as much as you'd like, or go back at any time and change your preferences. 

Once you're happy with what's been written, click Add to draft. The content will be added to your existing draft, where you can edit it as you would any other content. 

As you can probably tell, the AI does not know your company or communications as well as you do, so use the Writing assistant to polish your work, not do it for you. 

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Comments

23 comments
  • Hello! Can you please let me know if there's a way to remove the light grey border on tables? We need to use tables to format some imagery but don't need the line to show. Thanks :-)

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  • You can remove these in the code editor with the tag td style="border:none;". Anywhere you see a td or td style tag, insert the code snippet td style="border:none;".

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  • Hello, 

    Are there instructions for adding anchor links in pages, like the links that are shown at the beginning of this page? Thanks!

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  • Hey Camille. In the last release, we rolled out a new content editor that will allow for more flexibility in formatting your content. However, at the moment, there is no code editor, which was the only way to add anchor text in the past. The Product team plans on adding these options in an upcoming release, but currently there is not way to anchor text with the new content editor. 

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  • Thanks for the response.

    I'm participating in the EAP for the new text editor and was hoping there might be a way to work with anchors. I'll make the request with the product manager. It would be really helpful and it seems like other customers are looking for a way to add anchors as well.

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  • Will Lucid integration still work if we put the HTML in embed in the new content editor?

    *post 23.06.1 release

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  • Hi Aileen. If you're referring to embedding a Lucid chart via iframe, yes, that should work fine. I just tested it, and it worked for me.

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  • Hello!

    Just letting you know WYSIWYG post 23.06 looks a bit different

    image/video/table/link are outside of the "more" options

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  • Hey folks, I think this is answered in another comment, but I just want to confirm: After the 23.06 release, will there no longer be a way to access the code view on a page in text editor?  My team and I use that view frequently to make table of contents/anchor links.

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  • Hello! When in 2023 with the anchor tag code view capabilities return? Is there an ETA we can look forward to?

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  • Hi Marsha! As of now, the ability to anchor text is expected to go live in the upcoming 23.09 release, which will happen on Sept. 25. 

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  • Hello,

    I'm trying to follow your instructions for using anchor tags, but it's not working as anticipated -- and I'm very confused as to how to make it work.

    When I've used anchor tags, I have a link at the top that says (for example) "Q&A." When users click on the Q&A link, they're taken further down to the page to the Q&A section which has "Q&A" as a heading at the top of that section.

    But I can't seem to make this work using your instructions. I don't want to link at the top to say "link to xx" I want it to say "name of header" and then have it go to that header.

    Does that make sense?

    I really don't have to want to build out this section in HTML, like I've done with other pages.

    Thanks,

    Michelle

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  • Hey Michelle. I made this video for you. Let me know if you see this option in your interface, or if it's not there. 

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  • Thank you, Matthew! Yes, I do have that functionality. I think the instructions are a bit confusing. Also, I was trying to use a heading font for the Table of Contents links, and it looks like those need to be normal text for this to work -- you may want to specific that somewhere.

    I'm good to go now - thanks again, and Happy New Year!

    Michelle

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  • My anchor link isn't working? The Heading 1 is "Moves" which should link to #moves on the page. Is there a minimum number of characters?

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  • Please disregard my comment below. The anchors are working properly since I removed the table.

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  • Hello! Is there a known issue related to implementing anchor links on pages that were created before that functionality was available? I don't have the option to create them following the steps above on some older pages I'm looking to update for ease of navigation. Thanks!

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  • Hi Kristen. This is actually how the feature was designed. Content published prior to the text editor enhancement will not have the same editor abilities that newer content has. If you want to use the new editor features on older content, you could copy & paste the info to a new page, then publish it as new content in place of the old version.

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  • Hi Matthew,
    We are looking to update several key pages with anchor functionality to make them more usable. We have over 100 sites and many of them hyperlink to these pages (e.g. see our Safety policies page). If I create a new page, all of these hyperlinks will break. Can you let me know how I run a broken hyperlink report in Simpplr? Thanks

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  • Hi Natasha. As of now there is no report that will show you broken links in your content. A 3rd party tool that checks for broken links on your site may be an option. You could also use the data loader to export content, then Ctrl+F and replace to find all the locations where they hyperlinks exist, then replace them with the new link. Depending on the amount of content you have, this could be quite a heavy lift, but it is technically possible. 

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  • Thanks for the response, Matthew! I have the same concern as Natasha. Creating a new page complicates the process for many pages that already link to the pages that were created with the older text editor. Is there a workaround so that all the links to the page don't get broken or a way to see all the pages that link to this page?

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  • Hello. What are the preferred video formats (.mov, mp4 etc)? Thank you.:)

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  • Hi Angela. I don't believe there's a preferred format for videos. But Simpplr can support Mpeg-4 and QuickTime Formats (MP4, MOV, QT, and M4V), Flash Video (FLV and F4V), Microsoft Windows Formats (AVI, ASF, WMV and WMA), MPEG-1/2 (MPG, M1V, M2V, MP3), WAV, Matroska (MKV), OGG OGM & OGV, WEBM (videos recorded natively will be saved in this format), 3GP, RM, Webex (ARF), MXF.

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