The importance of a killer feature: XWiki's WYSIWYG rich text editor

17 Feb 2011 5 min read

This article caught my eye:

*One killer feature*

When working with startups, Ferriss sees one problem popping up over and over. “The biggest weakness I see is companies getting focused on implementing new features,” he says. “That’s the biggest waste of time that I see. They have a viable product that people are paying for and instead of identifying their cheapest avenue for acquiring profitable customers or focusing on polishing the product they already have, they focus on adding ten new features.

From: "Tim Ferriss on tolerable mediocrity, false idols, diversifying your identity, and the advice he gives startups" on the 37signals blog

As XWiki SAS' sales guy, I see this daily from customers who always ask us to make the WYSIWYG better and have it work seamlessly with existing tools, specifically with Word. All the bevy of advanced features XWiki Enterprise has to offer interests them only in the context of having a great text editor to begin with.

That's the reason why we've been working on and polishing our rich text editor for more than 2 years in order to make it ever smoother to use and better integrated with the Office suite.

Deciding to switch from TinyMCE to our own custom-built WYSIWYG editor was a tough choice back then. It took months of customer feedback and lengthy executive discussions in order to make the choice to invest time in it. Yet in retrospect, this decision was probably one of the best we ever made product-wise. Our editor is a key feature of the wiki and we have total control over it to improve it as we see fit.

Now I'll make sure to tell our tech team to make it even better :-) Keep up the good work Marius (@mflorea)!!

Note: this article initially appeared on my personal blog

You may also be interested in:

News

Enhancing digital sovereignty: XWiki and Nextcloud forge closer ties

XWiki SAS has long upheld its commitment to independence, with shareholders exclusively comprising current and former employees. However, recognizing the importance of strong collaboration among major open-source projects in the EU, the company is embracing a strategic shift through a symbolic investment in XWiki SAS from Frank Karlitschek, Founder and CEO of Nextcloud. Moreover, Nextcloud GmbH and XWiki SAS have signed a mutual resellers' agreement to provide their customers an easy way to purchase a complete solution from either vendor. Read the full article to learn about the why, how, and what.