The WordPress post editing experience is one of the next major features that will be evolving to meet the needs of modern publishers. We don’t know what that’s going to look like yet, but there’s a trend emerging where everyone is taking a stab at re-imagining the post editor. Free and commercial plugins are popping up all over the place, each with a different take on improving the publishing experience.
PrettyPress is one that landed in the WordPress plugin repository over the weekend. The plugin offers a live front-end preview of your post while you’re typing.
Essentially, it’s a Ghost-style editor without the Markdown. You could, however, install another plugin to add Markdown capabilities.
PrettyPress aims to streamline WordPress publishing by simplifying the editing layout. It removes the distraction of having to switch back and forth between the frontend and backend to preview post formatting.
While testing the plugin, I appreciated the fact that it doesn’t completely take over the post/page editor. Instead, it places a “Launch PrettyPress” button in the sidebar of the editor so that users can select when to activate the side-by-side screen.
The plugin uses Javascript and jQuery to create the side-by-side layout with live preview and the PrettyPress developer notes that larger posts may have some performance issues. This is one aspect of the plugin that they plan to improve in the future. If you like this style of editing experience and you want to test it out, download the PrettyPress plugin for free through your WordPress dashboard.
This is great, all these different ways of approaching the content editing experience build up collective knowledge that hopefully can lead to a better editor in core down the road.