What It Offers
Once you have installed WonderCMS and logged in the program shows any editable area with a dotted line around it. Also added to every page are a "Settings" and a red "Logout" button. You are then ready to begin building your web site and will probably either start by adding pages via the Menu option on the Settings panel or editing one of the two pages created on installation.
If you click within an editable area. The text will change to the code that produces the content and you can start typing. And that's the point, out of the box, it will be HTML code that you'll be typing – into an editor that, at first glance, has very little more sophistication than Windows Notepad!
Dealing with HTML
As explained on the Web Design page, HTML code need not be unnecessarily intimidating and you shouldn't need to worry about CSS as the theme looks after all that for you.
The image above you see how the main editable area of the Home page looks, once you click in it. In the few lines it contains you see almost all of the types of structure you are likely to use if you're aiming to build a site that contains only text and images. Just read through the three main pages describing the GregCustom theme and you'll be in full control of headings, paragraphs, lists and how to and know how to insert images and videos and caption, credit and align them. WonderCMS itself looks after all the other technical stuff in the background.
Editor Features
Auto Correction!
One thing you won't discover until you save your edits, which you do simply by clicking outside the editable area is that the editor will attempt to correct any errors in your code. This can cause problems for the new coder. As explained on the Suggestions page an error as simple as a missing punctuation symbol can have a quite dramatic effect. It's one reason why I would always recommend using an external editor and pasting in the code from that into the WonderCMS editor. Doing it that way means you still have the uncorrected code available to correct and learn from. That's much easier than trying to correct code re-written by the machine.
Missing Auto-Entry of Tags
The main thing that is missing in the default editor is any automation of the entering of HTML tags and to my mind it's a serious omission and almost the only reason that made me look for an alternative editor.
If you're a Windows user and it's just links and images that you struggle with, then you might be happy to type a few of the more complex tag structures followed by CTRL-X and rely on the WIN-V keystroke to open the Windows clipboard where you can pick the structure you want from the list of items recently sent there and paste them back into WonderCMS. However, with the simpler tags that will often take more keystrokes than typing the tags manually.
Missing Tag and Bracket Matching
As the editor does not recognise tags as anything special it's not a surprise that it also lacks the helpful feature that allows you to check you have all the pairs of tags in the right place and order..
Spell Check
There's one clear benefit over Windows Notepad and that is that as you're working inside your browser, you should have spell checking available.
Auto Indent
The default editor will indent code. If you hit TAB or a couple of spaces after a CR keystroke in order to indent that line, any future new lines will be indented by the same amount.
Related pages: Summernote, Monaco and the External Editors.