I really do feel fine:-)

Wednesday my frustration with the FCKEditor in RedDot CMS hit an all time high. I realized that the majority of the fixes I was working on had nothing to do with RedDot and had more to do with core editor functionality. So I took off on a wild run around internet sites to see what editors people were talking about and I found 3 that met my criteria (cross platform, not java):

1. FCKEditor
2. CuteEditor by CuteSoft
3. TinyMCE

CuteEditor is a commercial product which has a small licensing fee. I’m not opposed to paying for an editor, but I wouldn’t have access to the source code. This makes me a little nervous about adding my own extensions for the CMS integration.

TinyMCE is a javascript editor that was free and open source – now we’re talking. A few tests on their online demo had me convinced (like an actually functional paste from Word and self-closing tags -OMG). So I dove into an area I’ve not ventured before – integrating a new editor from scratch.

From the start, I wanted to minimize the impact on RedDot code to ease deployment and upgrade headaches. With the FCKEditor, saving posts form data to a RedDot CMS page which does some processing then executes the RQL to save the element. This makes changes like saving without closing the window difficult (putting it mildly). For this project, I took a different route. I placed a hidden iframe on the page with it’s own form that does the saving duties all on it’s own – including the RedDot processing (mainly for [ioRD] code replacements). Voilla! Ajax style saves.

As of right now, I can open and save content. There is no asset manager integration, or custom styling yet. Even so though, for the first time in a year, I’m excited about working on the editor again.