Galaxie Blogs' Post Interface is one of the most powerful out-of-the-box blog editors that you can find. There are countless number tools and productivity features to allow you to easily craft a beautiful blog post. 

Galaxie Blog has integrated a customized version of TinyMCE in the Edit Post Interface. TinyMCE is free and open-source software and uses the MIT license- there are no upcharges, restrictions, or limits on its usage and no requirement to share source code.

TinyMCE has numerous productivity features such as cleaning up pasted content from Word, Google Docs, Excel, and more. It is compliant with standards and this customized Galaxie Blog version has incorporated rich media support. 

Nearly all of the TinyMCE core plugins are incorporated. Galaxie Blog has also included some of the functionality that is typically found in paid 'freemium' plugins. For example, many of the features in the paid 'TinyDrive' premium plugin to handle media upload capabilities are already built into Galaxie Blog. We have also incorporated functionality that is not available such as embedding Bing Maps, uploading local videos with closed caption and video covers, image gallery support, and more.

There are scores of different Galaxie Blog editors. Each editor has a certain purpose, such as editing a post or uploading an icon for your site. All of the editors are WYSIWYG and offer a real-time preview. Here we will cover two of the main Edit Post interfaces below.

Major Edit Post Interfaces

There are two different major interfaces for a given post:

  1. Enclosure Media Editor

  2. Post Editor, also known as the Tiny Post Editor

Note: don't confuse Edit Post Interface and the Tiny Post Editor. The Edit Post interface contains scores of interfaces to edit the post whereas the Tiny Post Editor is one of the interfaces within the Edit Post Interface.

Enclosure Media Editor Feature Summary

An enclosure is an oversized image or media that is placed at the top of a post. It is often called a hero image as it captures the attention of the user when viewing a post. The enclosure editor is different than the post editor and handles different types of media. This editor may be used to attach the following media:

  1. Drag and drop interface to upload videos from a local source.  
  2. Embed videos from an external source, such as YouTube or Vimeo
    • Videos may also have:
      • A video cover poster (an image that covers the video when it is not being played)
      • WebVtt Captions can be applied to uploaded videos using the WebVTT Galaxie Editor.
  3. Drag and drop web-friendly images, such as .jpg, png, gif, webp, etc.
    • You can upload or include images from an external source.
      • If you upload an image, Galaxie Blog will try to automatically create the following images:
        • Optimized image for Facebook sharing
        • Optimized image for Twitter
        • 3 different images optimized for the Google Search Engine (used to display images in Google search results)
        • Creates thumbnail images for Galaxie Blog preview
      • Upload images may be edited within the browser. The following actions may be taken: change image orientation, brightness, contrast, gamma, flip image horizontally or vertically, etc, 
  4. Create static maps with various options
  5. Create map Routes showing the path of an intended travel route. A route can have two or more destinations (with a max limit of 12). 

Summary of Tiny Post Editor features

The Tiny Post Editor handles the editing and authoring of blog post content. The post editor contains the following major features:

  1. Undo/Redo
  2. Various paragraph formatting.
  3. Bold, italic
  4. Alignment tools (center, left justify, center, etc)
  5. Bulleting tools and indentation
  6. Link and anchor tools
  7. Special characters
  8. Source code
  9. HTML tables
  10. Code samples for the dozens of programming languages 
  11. Image editing of current embedded images
  12. Insert Media (videos and images)
  13. Upload and create image galleries using a drag and drop interface. 
    • The Gallery upload interface allows you to use images saved locally or to use your camera on your device if available. 
  14. Create Static Maps
  15. Generate Map Routes containing two or more destinations

Other Edit Post interfaces and concepts

Along with the enclosure and inline post WYSIWYG editors that were just covered, there are a few other Edit Post interface concepts that we should cover:

  • Release Post means that the post will be public. A post cannot be seen by non-administrators until it is released.
  • The post date may include past or future dates. If a post date is in the future you will have the option to automatically schedule the release of a post.
  • The Post Header contains optional Galaxie Blog Post Directives. These directives are used to attach a javascript to a post, include a ColdFusion template with a cfinclude, embed responsive videos, and manually set the properties of the meta tags used for SEO among other things. See Galaxie Post Directives for more information below. 
  • The JSON-LD button opens up the JSON-LD editor which can be used to manually set the JSON-LD. JSON-LD is automatically generated by Galaxie blog for SEO purposes. 
  • The Promote checkbox will highlight and promote a post to the top of the page. 
  • Change Alias will allow you to change the friendly name in the URL.
  • Use the Related Posts dropdown to show the related posts underneath the blog post. 

We will elaborate on the other features in future articles and posts.

Editor Notes: 

  • All editors will automatically create a preview of the media within the editor, even for videos and maps!
  • Be careful when uploading large videos or images. The max file size generally is around 8MB. If you have larger images or videos, you can upload them manually with an FTP client and link to them using the Enclosure Editor.