Some Limited Features
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 modal 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!
Introducing HTML
However, HTML code should not be unnecessarily intimidating. Below you see how the main editable area of the Home page looks, once you click in it. You'll find it contains 90% of the types of structures you are likely to use if you're aiming to build a site that contains only text and images.
As a first time user of WonderCMS may be concerned about what makes their chosen theme work. In most cases all one needs to know are half a dozen HTML tags, enough to know how to define headings, paragraphs, numeric and bulleted lists and how to insert images or videos. WonderCMS itself looks after all the other technical stuff in the background. The code you see above is explained in the page on Web Design.
Editor Features
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
Another feature I have noted that puts it ahead of Windows Notepad is that it will auto-indent. As a human writing code you'll want to divide it into blocks so besides adding tags it's a good idea to make the various blocks of code, such as paragraphs, easily visually distinguishable and the simplest way to do that is to separate them with carriage return keystrokes. 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.
Whether that is all you need very much depends on the intricacies of the code you will need to type. If you're a Windows user and it's just headings, paragraphs links and images, then you might be happy to type a few 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 to the clipboard.
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 confusion for the new coder. An error as simple as a missing punctuation symbol can have a quite dramatic effect. The editor will make what might appear to be a quite irrational wild guess at what was intended, inserting the code necessary to achieve that result.
Recovery from such auto-correction can be a problem for a novice coder. 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 so much easier than trying to correct code written by the machine.
Other Options
While the default editor may not seem to be anything to get excited about, its main advantage, as suggested above, is that you can always use your preferred text editor and paste its output into WonderCMS. However, if you want to avoid coding then the Summernote editor can be added to WonderCMS via an official Plug-in. This is a WYSIWYG editor that largely hides any underlying code from you. It works very much like a word processor, but, that does have some disadvantages, depending on the size of the site you plan.
If you're a programmer or, like me, you've been hand coding web sites since the days of Windows for Workgroups v3.11, then you may find have acquired something to which you've grown accustomed and will prefer to use that. If you're new to text editors I have a review of some of the Choice available.