TinyMCE - Rob Gietema (plone gebruikersdag 2008)¶

Rob Gietema (Four digits) talks about the work they're doing on TinyMCE, an alternative wysiwyg editor for plone.

Wysiwyg editors originally were browser-dependent. After a time, various browser-independent editors started to spring up like epoz, fck and tinymce. Epoz was developed into kupu, which is now the standard plone editor. FCK editor is still being kept up-to-date for plone by ingeniweb. Tinymce's plone integration stopped around 2006 as kupu became good enough for Jacob Smith, the person doing the integration.

Four digits resurrected the integration as it seemed better suited to one client's needs. The core need is to enter addresses into text on pages. The addresses are stored as content types in plone. Copy-pasting the text is a possibility, but that way the address doesn't get updated on changes. You could use the related items functionality, but then the address is not in-line. An alternative is to inject some placeholder in the page that gets replaced by the address on rendering.

They looked at editors with placeholder functionality. Kupu didn't have it and fck's is rudimentary. And they didn't want to make changes in existing editors, they wanted a pluggable system. Tinymce is very modular by design, so it seemed a good candidate. Tinymce also has a large user base and is being actively developed.

When integrating, they wanted a modern plone 3 product, including control panel configuration. For the look and feel of tinymce, they're using standard values from plone's base_properties and they're rendering the widgets in the plone style. So it integrates well into any site.

Rob demoed the product. In my opinion it looked very clean and clear. Actually easier than kupu by the looks of it.

Behind the scenes it is implemented with local portlet managers. The placeholder's address data is stored in a local portlet manager. On actually rendering the page, the portlet renderer will turn it into a formatted address.

(The presentation is available on-line)