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If you are a Joomla user you have most likely created, edited or modified a article for your site. When you did it you probably used whats called a WYSIWYG editor. These allow you to view your article like you might see it in Word or some sort of document editor. The problem with these editors is the poor code they insert. Much of the backend code that is being used in these editors is not compliant or is using old HTML markup to render your document. Also sometimes when you want to insert some sort of proper code to make your words more pleasing, they strip it out mercilessly.
Here are some examples of how a WYSIWYG editor can hurt your site.

Sematic code and being compliant, why does this concern me?

If you have ever pondered what XHTML compliance was, or saw it on our templates and had no idea what it was?
I am going to explain to you the importance of it all, and why you need to be compliant.

Have you ever gone to edit a article and found it was locked? Joomla does this to prevent multiple users from editing one article at a time. If you change a article, then one of your authors changes it at the same time you could have a potential mess on your hands. Editing a article is much like checking out a book at the library. When you edit it, it is not available for others and "checked out". If you are like me, most of my sites do not have multiple people working on them in the backend. It is possible to lock a article on accident, or if you allowed somebody in your backend recently who is not familiar with the system they might accidentally leave a article checked out. The first time you encounter this you might get a bit freaked out. This is how to unlock yourself from the mis-behaving article.

One of the most frequent questions we get asked is how to get the default Joomla editor to display properly when editing content. The problem that occurs with the way the editor works. By default, it will automatically pull the styling from the published template, which means if there is a background color or graphic set on the templates frontend, this will be used as the editors background. This makes editing content really difficult. To get this to display a normal white background all you need to do is login to your Joomla! admin, go to the Mambots Manager, click on the "TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor" to edit its properties. From the modules parameters on the right, make sure that "Template CSS classes" is set to No. This will then revert the editor to use its own default styling, giving you a nice white background to edit your content in.

By default, when linking to category or section of content items, Joomla sets the "blog view" to display in 2 columns. If you would like to change this so that they display one underneath the other, simply open up the menu link for that category/section and from the right hand side "parameters" options, set the options as follows:

To collapse or "hide" the left or right sidebar on certain pages, all you need to do is make sure that no modules are assigned to that particular menu link (page). The easiest way to do this, is go to your modules manager and choose the module position filter drop down (top right) and select the module position to filter by. All that this is doing is setting the modules page to only show all modules that are assigned to the "left" (or right) module postion. For example, if you wanted not have the sidebar shown on the wrapper page, as you wanted to utilize the full width of the template, you would make sure that all modules assigned to the left + right position were set NOT to display on the wrapper menu link. This can be done by opening each of the published modules that are assigned to that position and checking that the page/menu link is deselected in the " Pages / Items" Menu Item box (right hand side of the module options).

The built in Suckerfish menu sucks in the Joomla "Main Menu" by default. This can easily be changed to another menu by changing the configuration option in the templates index.php file (right at the top).