6 ms·

CKEditor 3.0, formerly known as FCKEditor, released (WYSIWYG editor)

44 points by slater 17y ago

revorad 17y ago
Wow, they claim to have had more than 3.5 million downloads since 2003. I have never even heard of this editor before. Does anyone here use it?
- joshsharp 17y ago
  Used it for ages, it worked better than TinyMCE back in the early days (though I think they're probably equal now.) Interestingly, I swear FCK was the creator's initials - I wonder if the app's name change is a reflection of a name change on his behalf? ;)
  - davecardwell 17y ago
    There is a “notes on the new name” section on the linked article: “For years we have been fighting with a relatively important issue with FCKeditor. While its quality has been strongly accepted, its name brought us troubles, mainly inside English speaking countries. The fact is that the initials of Frederico Caldeira Knabben have an unfortunate match with the most used English bad word.”
- vivekamn 17y ago
  Yes, we do at www.bharatmoms.com and of all the rich text editors(js based) we tried, this worked out to be the best.
  - revorad 17y ago
    Wow, you run an online community for mothers in India? Very interesting stuff. Didn't expect such a thing to exist. How's the site coming along?
- slater 17y ago
  It's fairly popular as a "drop-in" wysiwyg editor in custom-made CMSes, afaik.
- wlievens 17y ago
  I used it in a website for a customer.
- whalesalad 17y ago
  It used to be called FCKEditor, which is used on a lot of big sites such as pbworks.com (which was also formerly known as pbwiki)
- Ras_ 17y ago
  Well, it's been available for quite some time as a MediaWiki (also dokuwiki etc.) plugin, so I don't doubt those numbers.
- pbhj 17y ago
  http://www.google.co.uk/trends?q=(ckeditor|fckeditor)%2Ctinymce%2Chacker+news http://www.google.co.uk/trends?q=(ckeditor|fckeditor)%2Ctiny...
- prawn 17y ago
  Yeah, we use it on a fair few client sites. Works pretty well but sometimes struggles a bit with pasted Word content (but most things do).
GiraffeNecktie 17y ago
I'm very pleased with the accessibility improvements. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but it means that building interactive sites where accessibility is a project requirement will be a lot easier.
jdbeast00 17y ago
fckeditor code was such a pain to explore, hopefully this complete rewrite solves those problems. we use it over tinymce at work because of the free upload addons.
dabeeeenster 17y ago
The paste form Word feature is still woefully poor. The only editor I know that does this well is XStandard, which is a browser plugin and not free. Anyone know if this is something the CKEditor team are working on?
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  Is the problem related to cp1252-to-utf8 conversion issues?
  - trezor 17y ago
    As far as I know codepages is all about the browser (usually handles this well) and server-side solution (your milage may vary). When it comes to problems with (F)CKEditor, my problem in this particular case is usually the markup. The markup from Word may be "slightly" mangled and all, but you need massive amounts of server-side code to clean it up and it just feels so unnecessary when it actually renders fine in the editor client-side. Small but very annoying bug. In the end I switched to the YUI rich-text editor and it seems to be working better.
    - eli 17y ago
      I've had decent luck using TinyMCE's with the Paste From Word plugin along with a pretty restrictive whitelist of allowable tags and attributes. Interesting to hear that YUI does OK out of the box, I may have to give that a shot.
mlLK 17y ago
I thought this editor looked familiar, my University (IU & IUPUI) has been using the same 'FCKEditor' for 5+ years now; nevertheless, it serves as our WYSIWYG editor for sending messages back and forth via our University's version of Sakai's (http://sakaiproject.org/portal http://sakaiproject.org/portal) messaging system, I couldn't tell you how many times my session has timed out costing me a couple paragraphs of my time o_O Sloppily implemented (http://imgur.com/uarQy.jpg http://imgur.com/uarQy.jpg), <french-accent>No</french-accent>?
- pilif 17y ago
  while I agree that F?CKedit is a lot of baggage and not very friendly to program against, the timing out sessions are a problem of the guys that implemented your messaging system and not a problem of CKedit.
philfreo 17y ago
And if you use ExpressionEngine (a very popular CMS), there's a new plugin for it: http://brandon-kelly.com/wygwam http://brandon-kelly.com/wygwam
mrfish 17y ago
I used to curse FCKEditor because it was so slow and unweildy for ajax apps. Creating and destroying and then customizing was a pain. Not many WYSIWYG editors really do these nicely. They all seem to be made to work in a static load once html page. Now CKEditor says you can do all that so I'm very excited. If it is fast, can create and destroy with ease and plays well with jquery then it's my new favorite editor!
- c3o 17y ago
  Thanks in advance for reporting back here whether it lives up to these promises once you've tried it :P
dpnewman 17y ago
Looks hopefully like a great rewrite. FCK = Definitely a major player in the wysiwyg scene for long years. I have fingers x-ed on this being the step that resolves the search. Finding a wysiwig that is not bloated and overly complex, bug-free and has the essentials, has occupied me for years. The one thing CK clearly swung and missed in their demo though is the seeming thrill they express about being "colorful". The defaults for modal dialog buttons: bright orange, yellow and green!! CKEditor, you could not have done anything more to suggest you were somehow ignoring or out of touch with the evolution of web UI than this. Now I know that this is all css customizable. Great. I look forward to altering those. But really, if you can show us a web site with good design that uses flaring colors in a text editor UI, I will be stunned. Anyway, sorry for the rant... thrilled that you have moved this forward and can't wait to try. I hope though that you quickly iterate the defaults and the demo on the site to be in line with the notion that UI widgets should not scream for attention, but emphasize the clean and functional.
- brandonkelly 17y ago
  Haha, definitely agree with this. I took some time to override much of the Kama skin's CSS (including the dialogs) for Wygwam. Ended up with something much more clean: http://brandon-kelly.com/fieldframe/showcase http://brandon-kelly.com/fieldframe/showcase
oink 17y ago
Now with 90% fewer snickers.
Keyframe 17y ago
It would be useful to have a simple editor like TinyMCE but with image browsing/uploading plugin that doesn't just provide you with a file system interface. Instead it would be more useful, IMO, to have a database backend powered images table that you can search through via autocomplete/tags that you can give to each image when uploading it. It would also be useful to have a module in that plugin to search flickr and other services images for CC friendly images that you can transfer to your site easily - retaining all the authors info (to be displayed next to an image). Actually I have this in my TODO list somewhere down the road.
rudd 17y ago
Thank god they changed the name. This is truly a great editor and I've seen it used many times, but I always felt uneasy saying it out loud or even typing it to someone who had never heard of it. It's just awkward. The new name has no (blatant) bad connotations.
lleger 17y ago
Too bad it still sucks. It's such a pain to implement.
thras 17y ago
One of our users had dropped this into their web structure years ago, never updated it, and had their account nicely owned due to a years-old vulnerability.

44 points by slater 17y ago

Wow, they claim to have had more than 3.5 million downloads since 2003. I have never even heard of this editor before. Does anyone here use it?

joshsharp 17y ago
Used it for ages, it worked better than TinyMCE back in the early days (though I think they're probably equal now.) Interestingly, I swear FCK was the creator's initials - I wonder if the app's name change is a reflection of a name change on his behalf? ;)
- davecardwell 17y ago
  There is a “notes on the new name” section on the linked article: “For years we have been fighting with a relatively important issue with FCKeditor. While its quality has been strongly accepted, its name brought us troubles, mainly inside English speaking countries. The fact is that the initials of Frederico Caldeira Knabben have an unfortunate match with the most used English bad word.”
vivekamn 17y ago
Yes, we do at www.bharatmoms.com and of all the rich text editors(js based) we tried, this worked out to be the best.
- revorad 17y ago
  Wow, you run an online community for mothers in India? Very interesting stuff. Didn't expect such a thing to exist. How's the site coming along?
slater 17y ago
It's fairly popular as a "drop-in" wysiwyg editor in custom-made CMSes, afaik.
wlievens 17y ago
I used it in a website for a customer.
whalesalad 17y ago
It used to be called FCKEditor, which is used on a lot of big sites such as pbworks.com (which was also formerly known as pbwiki)
Ras_ 17y ago
Well, it's been available for quite some time as a MediaWiki (also dokuwiki etc.) plugin, so I don't doubt those numbers.
pbhj 17y ago
http://www.google.co.uk/trends?q=(ckeditor|fckeditor)%2Ctinymce%2Chacker+news http://www.google.co.uk/trends?q=(ckeditor|fckeditor)%2Ctiny...
prawn 17y ago
Yeah, we use it on a fair few client sites. Works pretty well but sometimes struggles a bit with pasted Word content (but most things do).

GiraffeNecktie 17y ago

I'm very pleased with the accessibility improvements. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but it means that building interactive sites where accessibility is a project requirement will be a lot easier.

jdbeast00 17y ago

fckeditor code was such a pain to explore, hopefully this complete rewrite solves those problems. we use it over tinymce at work because of the free upload addons.

dabeeeenster 17y ago

The paste form Word feature is still woefully poor. The only editor I know that does this well is XStandard, which is a browser plugin and not free. Anyone know if this is something the CKEditor team are working on?

RyanMcGreal 17y ago
Is the problem related to cp1252-to-utf8 conversion issues?
- trezor 17y ago
  As far as I know codepages is all about the browser (usually handles this well) and server-side solution (your milage may vary). When it comes to problems with (F)CKEditor, my problem in this particular case is usually the markup. The markup from Word may be "slightly" mangled and all, but you need massive amounts of server-side code to clean it up and it just feels so unnecessary when it actually renders fine in the editor client-side. Small but very annoying bug. In the end I switched to the YUI rich-text editor and it seems to be working better.
  - eli 17y ago
    I've had decent luck using TinyMCE's with the Paste From Word plugin along with a pretty restrictive whitelist of allowable tags and attributes. Interesting to hear that YUI does OK out of the box, I may have to give that a shot.

mlLK 17y ago

I thought this editor looked familiar, my University (IU & IUPUI) has been using the same 'FCKEditor' for 5+ years now; nevertheless, it serves as our WYSIWYG editor for sending messages back and forth via our University's version of Sakai's (http://sakaiproject.org/portal http://sakaiproject.org/portal) messaging system, I couldn't tell you how many times my session has timed out costing me a couple paragraphs of my time o_O Sloppily implemented (http://imgur.com/uarQy.jpg http://imgur.com/uarQy.jpg), <french-accent>No</french-accent>?

pilif 17y ago
while I agree that F?CKedit is a lot of baggage and not very friendly to program against, the timing out sessions are a problem of the guys that implemented your messaging system and not a problem of CKedit.

philfreo 17y ago

And if you use ExpressionEngine (a very popular CMS), there's a new plugin for it: http://brandon-kelly.com/wygwam http://brandon-kelly.com/wygwam

mrfish 17y ago

I used to curse FCKEditor because it was so slow and unweildy for ajax apps. Creating and destroying and then customizing was a pain. Not many WYSIWYG editors really do these nicely. They all seem to be made to work in a static load once html page. Now CKEditor says you can do all that so I'm very excited. If it is fast, can create and destroy with ease and plays well with jquery then it's my new favorite editor!

c3o 17y ago
Thanks in advance for reporting back here whether it lives up to these promises once you've tried it :P

dpnewman 17y ago

Looks hopefully like a great rewrite. FCK = Definitely a major player in the wysiwyg scene for long years. I have fingers x-ed on this being the step that resolves the search. Finding a wysiwig that is not bloated and overly complex, bug-free and has the essentials, has occupied me for years. The one thing CK clearly swung and missed in their demo though is the seeming thrill they express about being "colorful". The defaults for modal dialog buttons: bright orange, yellow and green!! CKEditor, you could not have done anything more to suggest you were somehow ignoring or out of touch with the evolution of web UI than this. Now I know that this is all css customizable. Great. I look forward to altering those. But really, if you can show us a web site with good design that uses flaring colors in a text editor UI, I will be stunned. Anyway, sorry for the rant... thrilled that you have moved this forward and can't wait to try. I hope though that you quickly iterate the defaults and the demo on the site to be in line with the notion that UI widgets should not scream for attention, but emphasize the clean and functional.

brandonkelly 17y ago
Haha, definitely agree with this. I took some time to override much of the Kama skin's CSS (including the dialogs) for Wygwam. Ended up with something much more clean: http://brandon-kelly.com/fieldframe/showcase http://brandon-kelly.com/fieldframe/showcase

oink 17y ago

Now with 90% fewer snickers.

Keyframe 17y ago

It would be useful to have a simple editor like TinyMCE but with image browsing/uploading plugin that doesn't just provide you with a file system interface. Instead it would be more useful, IMO, to have a database backend powered images table that you can search through via autocomplete/tags that you can give to each image when uploading it. It would also be useful to have a module in that plugin to search flickr and other services images for CC friendly images that you can transfer to your site easily - retaining all the authors info (to be displayed next to an image). Actually I have this in my TODO list somewhere down the road.

rudd 17y ago

Thank god they changed the name. This is truly a great editor and I've seen it used many times, but I always felt uneasy saying it out loud or even typing it to someone who had never heard of it. It's just awkward. The new name has no (blatant) bad connotations.

lleger 17y ago

Too bad it still sucks. It's such a pain to implement.

thras 17y ago

One of our users had dropped this into their web structure years ago, never updated it, and had their account nicely owned due to a years-old vulnerability.