Hi JC! We’ve just finished the first version of our integration of the CKEditor v3.0. Features are:
- More or less “drop-in” replacement for magnolia’s older FCKEditor module - Configurable at the Module, Site and Dialog Control levels with the ability to override settings at the more specific level - Configuration options for toolbar/functions, for colours, for formats and, importantly, for available styles - Ability to pick images and files from DMS via Repository Browser - Image-Preview within the Repository Browser when picking images - Ability to upload new images and files to DMS from within file-picker In the first version, our design goals included not to modify the standard distribution of CKEditor (although we do extend it by providing a css-skin that is more magnolia-like), nor to modify any parts of magnolia itself (although we did of course extend magnolia with our own module). Integrating the editor itself was nearly trivial – CKEditor is very easy to integrate. Problem areas of the integration were as follows: - Integration of Image-Picker / File-Picker --> this was very difficult to accomplish without modifying magnolia, and at the moment, essentially amounts to a huge, ugly javascript “hack”, which ties magnolia’s RepositoryBrowser in with CKEditor. - Links and Link management: for the editor to display items correctly (images, links, embedded flash, anything involving a URL) the URLs have to be set correctly (including context path, etc…). Magnolia would prefer to deal with the links as UUIDs. The FCKEditor-Module’s Link-Transformation (which we reuse for our CKEditor) is a bit ugly, IMHO. The result now works quite well, but still has some shortcomings: - CKEditor’s image plugin provides far too much control for our purposes: you can explicity set things like image height and width, border width, css styles and more. We don’t want our editor’s to be able to set all this, as they will mess up the site’s layout. However, CKEditor does not allow for configuration of these fields. - The Link-Handling is very ugly, the context-root is displayed in the URL-field of the image properties dialog (rather than just the repository path), the user could manually edit the URL and create problems that way. - The inserted HTML does not suit our needs. Ideally, when inserting an image, we would like to insert not just an <img> tag, but a surrounding <div>, a caption, some javascript to enlarge the image, etc… None of this is possible by just configuring CKEditor. - The repository browser could be improved, the preview function is still fairly basic. The massively ugly javascipt hack I made to integrate it virtually guarantees that the solution will not “last long” (survive many magnolia upgrades without modification) - Inserted images are the “original” version. There is no easy way to pick a DAM variation of an image. So I think that a second version of our CKEditor plugin is likely to follow, which improves the integration by: - Providing an alternative, custom image plugin for CKEditor which has a vastly reduced number of settable options, but in addition: o allows selecting DAM variations for the images, o handles the UUID / Preview URL better, o displays the URLs better for the user, o handles magnolia metadata to pre-fill image attributes like the alt, title, caption o and inserts custom (configurable) HTML for the images rather than just basic <img> tags. - Providing a complete replacement for magnolia’s Repository Browser which: o shows image and document previews and meta-information while browsing o allows uploads from within the picker o allows creating new folders from within the picker o harmonizes well with our custom CKEditor image plugin - If possible, replacing the current LinkTransformer mechanism with something that is a bit cleaner Note that we examined other editors prior to starting, including TinyMCE, Kupu, BXE, Aloha Editor and others, and determined that (for us) CKEditor was both most powerful and easiest to integrate. As a guideline, if you have magnolia experience and are a good java coder, a basic integration should be possible in under a week. A more advanced integration as described above I would estimate at about 2-3 weeks + testing. Regards from Vienna, Richard Unger Von: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Im Auftrag von Jan Christian Haddorp Gesendet: Donnerstag, 04. November 2010 20:30 An: [email protected] Betreff: [magnolia-user] Alternative richtext editor / TinyMCE Hi, Are there any experiences in using a different richtext editor - means not FckEditor. What has to be done to switch to an editor like TinyMCE or the InnovaStudio Editor? Thanks a lot, JC ---------------------------------------------------------------- For list details see http://www.magnolia-cms.com/home/community/mailing-lists.html To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[email protected]> ----------------------------------------------------------------
