Adding Content in a Content Management System (CMS)
by Dave Maloney
You've been up all night compiling this new remarkable message, or you just got the file sent to you from your marketing team, and you want to get it up on your website. After all, you built your site on a content management system so you could create and edit your webpages yourself without having to get a degree in programming.
Adding content in a content management system (CMS) seems like it should be the simplest part of the whole webpage-building process, but there are a few complications that can (and do) arise fairly often.
If your content was written in a "rich text editing" program (usually Microsoft Word) you would think it would be a simple copy/paste into the CMS window. But after pasting the content into the WYSIWYG (actually stands for "What you see is what you get!") window on your webpage, you probably end up with a lot of electronic swearing or gibberish that looks like this:
Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000167 EndHTML:0000000793 StartFragment:0000000457 EndFragment:0000000777
This text was created in a rich text editor (like Microsoft Word) and then copy-pasted directly into the editing field of a page on HubSpot's CMS. There is extra formatting that you don't see while you are working in this program that just “tags along” when you copy and paste it. <style type="text/css"><!--
<!
@page { margin: 0.79in }
P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }
>
--></style>
You can go back and try to delete around what you wanted and what you didn't want and hope you got it right, but it's a lot less frustrating for you to avoid this beforehand. In your WYSIWYG editor, there is a button that reads "HTML" (see the ugly red arrow); clicking the HTML button will give you a new window in which to paste your content without fear of extra gibberish:
This text was created in the same sentence and same file (in a rich text editor like Microsoft Word) and then copy-pasted into the HTML window on a page on HubSpot's CMS. The extra formatting that “tags along” from the former program is ignored in the HTML field, and you're left with clean, plain text with no formatting, which will show up the way you want in your CMS.
Some WYSIWYG dashboards may have a button that reads "Paste from Word" or "Paste as Plain Text", but experiment with them to see if you get the results you wanted.
Another simple way to avoid the extra formatting around your intended copy is to copy/paste your content into a "plain text editor" first, such as TextEdit if you're on a Mac or NotePad if you're still using one of those other machines. These programs will ignore the old code from your previous software and leave it safe to now be copied and pasted right into your CMS WYSIWYG window.
Tedious as this may all sound, an extra step or two upfront will save you a lot of aggravation later on!