This will be my second public plugin release. I will put it up on BitBucket
soon, but for now, I thought I would introduce a new plugin I've been
working on. Sometimes you just need a WYSIWYG editor. This plugin integrates
CKEditor into web2py. It acts much like the Auth object in its usage. For
example, in your model, you need to import and initialize it:
from plugin_ckeditor import CKEditor
ckeditor = CKEditor(db)
ckeditor.define_tables()
It's most basic usage is to assign it to a Field widget:
db.define_table('content',
Field('title', length=255),
Field('public', 'boolean', default=True),
Field('text', 'text', widget=ckeditor.widget)
)
The CKEditor now automatically becomes available every time SQLFORM is used.
This is a screen shot of it in action:
<https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-HLLFte_tXCw/ThclwgF-TtI/AAAAAAAAAC8/cu3qqcUuDeE/Screen%252520shot%2525202011-07-08%252520at%25252011.01.36%252520AM.png>
This is great by itself, however, I decided to take it a few steps further.
First of all, also supports edit in place. This is a test page to
demonstrate:
<https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-bsWPwiuQg20/Thcl_C0sraI/AAAAAAAAADE/73qIJK9_OS8/Screen%252520shot%2525202011-07-08%252520at%25252011.02.06%252520AM.png>
To make this content editable, all it takes is the following line in the
view:
{{=ckeditor.edit_in_place('.editable', URL())}}
This makes any element with the 'editable' class editable in place. It also
requires a URL to save the data to when the save button is clicked. Here's
what it looks like in edit mode:
<https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-9kv2lFa4JjA/ThcmcWAGF5I/AAAAAAAAADM/UAwhM6LxoeQ/Screen%252520shot%2525202011-07-08%252520at%25252011.02.16%252520AM.png>
It is all AJAX enabled, spellchecks as you type, and it's fast. Edit in
place is another great feature, but I also took it a step further than that
and integrated upload and browse functionality for images and Flash movies:
<https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-XtkEW2sXXyU/Thcm-IwkZ8I/AAAAAAAAADU/uyPo2FTMob0/Screen%252520shot%2525202011-07-08%252520at%25252011.33.28%252520AM.png>
<https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-mBjk0bs_-Z8/ThcnEixpCDI/AAAAAAAAADc/_xH6sWwgs6o/Screen%252520shot%2525202011-07-08%252520at%25252011.35.29%252520AM.png>
<https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-M4ddg9Dz9Kg/ThcnH0dubEI/AAAAAAAAADk/9WzdPj1ZiVE/Screen%2Bshot%2B2011-07-08%2Bat%2B11.35.06%2BAM.png>
<https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-8DKGzp3qqbs/ThcnV3GNCOI/AAAAAAAAADs/A6_-CGOM8-g/Screen%252520shot%2525202011-07-08%252520at%25252011.35.42%252520AM.png>
The upload and browse functionality is all taken care of by the plugin and
does not require you to do anything on your end once you have initialized
the plugin in your model as demonstrated above.
I used the following resources in developing this plugin, so a special
thanks to the authors of these for providing the ground work required to
make this possible:
http://www.web2pyslices.com/main/slices/take_slice/18
http://www.bitsntuts.com/jquery/ckeditor-edit-in-place-jquery-plugin
I have a couple other issues to resolve before I post the code, but I'd love
to get some feedback to see if the community finds this plugin useful.
