Hello!
I created a simple CMS with PHP/MySQL and would like to make it easy for people to insert some formatting, such as bold, italics, underlined, links, etc., so that they don't have to know html code...

What is the best solution to develop something like this? Javascript?

Forms are basically text areas where people can type freely.

Something like we have here in this forum would be great.
Are there any ready to go products out there?

Or maybe just some tutorial of how to create one of the tools so I can create the others...

Thank you for any hints!

You might want to invest in a third party WYSIWYG editor. There are lots out there, Google or another search engine might be a good place to start...

I used (tried) several wysig editors. Finally I made my choise: YUI RTE

It's very easy to implement, easy to extend (add new features, new buttons), easy to use with Ajax based forms.

It's free, lightweight, you can even include a javascript right from yahoo's server, they allow this.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/editor/

Try it, use it, you can thank me later.

I use the extensible Spaw2 from Solmetra. Have used FCKEditor and didn't like it. Spaw2 is very useful because you can add tabs to the processor so you can write for multiple translations with a single widget. However the most useful part of Spaw2 is the file manager. It allows you to upload files to directories of your choice and has a full file browser (e.g. preview stored images). The interface has been translated into loads of languages (provided the Welsh translation myself).