The text editor
Format text, add links, and embed images, videos, and buttons in body and description fields across Basker
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 do not need to enable the text editor. It is built into every field that accepts paragraphs, lists, headings, links, or embedded content.
Formatting toolbar
The toolbar above the editor handles the everyday formatting you would expect from a word processor.
- Bold, italic, underline: apply to selected text.
- Font colour: color selected text, choosing from a preset palette or entering a custom color.
- Headings: every level, from H1 down to H6, is available. Your theme usually renders the page or content title as the H1. Start your own body headings at H2.
- Bulleted and numbered lists: turn the current line into a list, or convert several selected lines at once.
- Alignment: left, center, or right.
- Indentation: increase or decrease the indent for a paragraph, 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 do not 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 do not 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 will not 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 item on your Basker site (a page, event, person, season, series, work, venue, organization, or post). Pick it from the picker. Internal links update automatically if the target is renamed or moved, so you do not 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 an item that is still a draft, unpublished, or deleted, the link will not work on the live site until the target is published. Link to a different item instead, or publish the target.
Embedding content inside body text
You can also add richer content directly into a body field: images, videos, buttons, and more. Each appears inline at the cursor position where you insert it.
Image or video
Insert an image or video from the media library, upload a new one directly, 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, center, 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 program 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 does not otherwise produce: typically a third-party widget, an embed snippet from a partner, or markup a developer has handed you. The content is sanitized 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 program table, and so on. These appear in the inline-block menu alongside images and buttons when your theme provides them. If you do not see a theme block you are 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 by default. 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 is not 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 behaviors 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 does not recognize has no visible effect.
Do not apply classes you have not been given. The editor does not validate class names, so a misspelled or unknown class has no visible effect. Applying styling at random produces output that is hard to maintain. If your theme developer has not asked you to use this, you almost certainly do not need it.
If specific words render in an unexpected style (for example, small caps on a brand name) even after you remove any class, the styling is almost certainly inline formatting carried over in the content itself, not something the Class / ID tool added. This commonly happens with text migrated from a previous system, such as legacy Tessitura or TNEW content, where the original markup includes an inline font-variant style. To remove it, edit the affected text directly rather than using the Class / ID tool.
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 colors, 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 is not 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.