The text editor

The text editor is the formatted-text field you use everywhere in Basker that takes more than a single line — author bios, announcement messages, season and series descriptions, post bodies, custom field bodies, and more. This page covers what you can do inside it.

You don't need to enable anything; the text editor is built in. Whenever a field accepts paragraphs, lists, headings, links, or embedded content, you're using it.

Formatting toolbar

The toolbar above the editor handles the everyday formatting you'd expect from a word processor.

• Bold, italic, underline — apply to selected text.
• Font colour — colour selected text, choosing from a preset palette or entering a custom colour.
• Headings — H2, H3, and H4 are available for breaking up longer content. H1 is reserved for the page or record title; you don't add another inside body content.
• Bulleted and numbered lists — turn the current line into a list, or convert several selected lines at once.
• Alignment — left, centre, or right.
• Indentation — push a paragraph in or pull it back out, useful inside lists and for quotes.
• Horizontal rule — a divider line between sections.
• Special characters — insert punctuation, currency symbols, accented letters, arrows, and other symbols from a picker.

Keyboard shortcuts work for common formatting (Cmd/Ctrl + B for bold, Cmd/Ctrl + I for italic, and so on). Plain typing still produces normal paragraphs — pressing Enter starts a new one.

Formatting titles and descriptions

Title and description fields take light inline formatting. Select a word or phrase and a small toolbar appears with three controls:

• Bold
• Italic
• Underline

These are the only options — titles and descriptions don't take headings, lists, links, or embedded content, only emphasis on the text itself. The same keyboard shortcuts apply (Cmd/Ctrl + B, Cmd/Ctrl + I).

Wherever a title or description needs to appear without styling — a browser tab, a search result, a link preview, an export — Basker uses an unstyled copy of the same text, kept in sync automatically as you edit. You don't manage two versions; the formatting is simply dropped where plain text is expected.

On the live site, your custom theme decides whether the formatting shows. The formatted version is available to themes, so a developer can render the bold or italic you applied in a heading; if a theme uses the plain version instead, the emphasis won't appear there. As with body content, preview to confirm how your theme handles it.

Adding links

Select the text you want to link, then click the link button. The link panel offers two destinations:

• Internal link — link to another record in your Basker site (a page, event, person, season, series, work, venue, organisation, or post). Pick the record from the picker. Internal links update automatically if the target is renamed or moved, so you don't have to maintain them by hand.
• External URL — link to anywhere outside your site. Paste the full URL.

Both types support an Open in a new tab option. Use it sparingly — only for off-site links and downloads, where leaving your site mid-flow makes sense.

If an internal link points at a record that's still in draft, unpublished, or has been deleted, the link won't work on the live site until the target is published. Re-link to a different record, or publish the target.

Embedding content inside body text

Beyond plain text, you can drop richer content directly into a body field. Each appears inline at the cursor position when you insert it.

Image or video

Insert an image or video from the media library, upload a new one on the spot, or paste a URL from YouTube or Vimeo to embed a video. Each image or video can carry an optional heading, caption, and credit that render alongside it on the live site. Images also take an alignment — left, centre, or right to float the image so text wraps around it, or none to keep it inline.

If you replace the underlying file later in the media library, the embedded image or video updates automatically wherever it appears.

Button

A call-to-action button with a link and an alignment option. Use it inside body content where a strong "do this next" matters more than a plain link — a "Book tickets" link inside a programme note, a "Read the full review" call-out, a "Sign up to the newsletter" prompt at the end of an essay.

The button's link can be internal or external, the same as any other link.

Raw HTML

An escape hatch for embedding HTML the editor doesn't otherwise produce — typically a third-party widget, an embed snippet from a partner, or markup a developer has handed you. The content is sanitised before rendering, so a few tag types may be stripped.

Use raw HTML sparingly. Anything you can build with the regular editor is easier to maintain — raw HTML is the right tool only when nothing else will do.

Theme blocks

Some custom themes expose extra inline blocks specifically designed for body content — a featured-event card, a quote block with attribution, a programme-table, and so on. These appear in the inline-block menu alongside images and buttons when your theme provides them. If you don't see a theme block you're expecting, check with whoever maintains your theme.

Tables

Tables are available in the editor but are currently experimental — the underlying HTML is correct, but how a table looks on the live site depends entirely on your theme's styling. Some themes render tables cleanly out of the box; others leave them visually plain.

Before publishing a page that uses a table, preview the page on the live site so you can see how your theme handles it. If the result isn't usable, consider a list or a series of paragraphs instead, or ask your theme developer to add table styling.

Advanced: applying a CSS class or ID

The editor's advanced-formatting menu lets you apply a custom CSS class or HTML ID to a selected range of text. This is for cases where your theme developer has built specific styles or behaviours that need to be triggered from inside body content — a "drop cap" treatment on a leading paragraph, a highlight class for emphasis, an ID used as an in-page anchor, and so on.

The Class / ID tool only attaches a class or ID to the text — it applies no styling of its own. A class name does something only if your active theme defines matching CSS for it. A class your theme doesn't recognise has no visible effect.

Don't apply classes you haven't been given. The editor doesn't validate class names, so misspelled or unknown classes have no visible effect — and applying styling at random produces output that's hard to maintain. If your theme developer hasn't asked you to use this, you almost certainly don't need it.

How your theme decides the look

Your custom theme is responsible for how formatted text actually appears on the live site — heading sizes, list bullets, paragraph spacing, link colours, and whether tables get nice borders. The editor produces the structural HTML; your theme styles it.

This means the same body content can look different across themes, and that what you see in the editor isn't pixel-identical to what visitors see. Use preview to check the rendered result before publishing, especially the first time you use an unusual feature like tables or the raw HTML block.

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