Here we go with another CKEditor Weekly! We took a small break from writing last week, just to bring you a lot of updates and resources in one post. Our past two weeks were mostly about fixing issues in our latest beta releases - CKEditor 4.5 and CKFinder 3. We also managed to organise a "B-day", which was actually pretty far from a birthday party... Read on!

CKEditor in Review

For the last two weeks we were focused on bugs and enhancements for CKEditor 4.5. Around 50% of tickets assigned to this milestone are either already closed or work on them has begun.

We are happy to see that developers are already working with the features that were introduced in CKEditor 4.5 Beta. It's great to see how quick the adoption is and the feedback we get is very valuable, because it allows us to evaluate and polish these features before the final release.

A new article about contributing code and providing patches was added to CKEditor Developer's Guide. It's really amazing that the number of editor patches proposed by the community is constantly increasing and lots of community contributions have already made it to official releases. To make the process easier and more manageable, we now included a few tips in our documentation - make sure you read them before creating your next pull request!

We were also pretty busy with introducing some changes in the CKEditor Add-ons Repository:

• Sorting options are now easier to use (on mobile especially): Most popular / Last updated / Name [a-z] / Name [z-a].
• The number of add-ons per page has increased (to 15).
• We added information about presets in which a plugin is included by default.
• We added download charts.

Other Projects

CKFinder 3

Here is a list of CKFinder 3 related actions from the last two weeks:

• We refactored automated tests to work on the build and source version of CKFinder.
• We fixed selecting folders and files on touch devices.
• The application startup time has been significantly improved by refactoring the startup logic.
• We introduced lazy loading of resource types which significantly speeds up the application.
• Sending command to the server now returns a promise.
• A couple of important usability issues were resolved (e.g. closing the context menu, dropdown buttons on application blur).
• We fixed an issue with unexpected autogrowing of CKFinder on iOS.
• We added API events allowing to define easily what should happen on double click and double tap.
• The documentation has been heavily revised and corrected.

Please also notice that soon we will shut down our CKFinder social media outlets and move relevant communication to our CKSource accounts (Twitter,Facebook, Google+). Thank you for being a part of CKFinder community and please watch out for the upcoming CKFinder updates on CKSource social media accounts.

Bender.js

7th of May was the "B-day" during which Grzegorz Pabian made a presentation about Bender.js to the rest of our developers. 

The presentation covered the following topics:

• Application architecture
• Project dependencies
• Gotchas & lessons learned
• Related projects
• Tests
• Ideas for the future

After that we had a small hackaton, where the developers tried to resolve some of Bender tickets themselves to get more hands-on experience with the project.

Around the Net

• Proof of concept video of an inline math editing using MathQuill and widgets was made by Piotrek Koszuliński, CKEditor core developer.

• effective_ckeditor version 1.7.0 released. This gem wraps the CKEditor Javscript library for use with the effective_regions gem.
• Very informative video tutorial on how to link to internal pages in CKEditor was published by Sebastian Sulinski.

That sums up the last two weeks. If you would like to be featured in one of our CKEditor Weeklies, or have an interesting tidbit that relates to CKEditor, leave a comment below or contact us! 
Enjoy the rest of the week!

Here we go with the latest issue of CKEditor Weekly! Past week was all about fixing issues in our latest beta releases - CKEditor 4.5 and CKFinder 3. We also had the pleasure to play around with a different take on CKEditor's UI - AlloyEditor. Read on for more!

CKEditor in Review

• Work on CKEditor 4.5 continues. Last week we hit some bigger issues, nevertheless, every single day we are closer to the final release. Some work has also been done on CKEditor 4.4.8. It will be released together with CKEditor 4.5 as the last bug-fixing release in the 4.4.* branch.
• Additionally, we had a huge pleasure to play around with AlloyEditor. This is a completely different take on CKEditor UI. AlloyEditor uses CKEditor as an editing framework, but the UI was replaced with a set of completely new React-based plugins. It is a great example that architecture implemented in CKEditor can be reused to achieve diverse results. Modularity and reusability is the right direction for CKEditor and we have been focused on reinforcing these aspects for the last few years. For instance, end-user features introduced by CKEditor 4.5 (like support for uploading dropped files or the media embedding module) are based on lower-level tools which can be used by developers to build their custom plugins with different UI or behavior. These are also the most important requirements for CKEditor 5, which is now being designed from scratch to push the idea of the "editing framework" even further.
• The CKEditor website has also undergone significant changes. The Add-ons Repository search tool was completely rewritten - go see for yourself!

Other Projects

CKFinder 3

Here is a list of CKFinder 3 related actions from the last week:

• The integration with CKEditor was fixed and enhanced - it now allows for passing CKFinder configuration options and specifying target folder for file uploads.
• Displaying modal dialog windows on mobile devices was fixed.
• Further updates were added to the documentation.
• Some important accessibility issues were discussed and the results are as follows: 
  • We started working on intuitive keyboard navigation support, with plenty of improvements scheduled for 3.0
  • We agreed the way in which focused items should be displayed and scheduled it for 3.0 as well.
• A few styling issues were fixed, including missing borders and scrollbar appearing in inappropriate places.
• We fixed the version of the layout of CKFinder with a completely removed toolbar.
• The landing page for CKFinder 3.0 preview was developed and is almost ready to go live, with several working samples included!
• Internal CKFinder tests were significantly improved and we are now able to test different integration methods and release versions.

Around the Net

• The ckeditor_rails gem was updated to version 4.4.7. This gem integrates CKEditor with Rails asset pipeline for ease of use.
• AlloyEditor - a modern WYSIWYG editor built on top of CKEditor with a totally new UI based on React was released.
• Bootstrap Visibility Plugin - plugin for CKEditor which extends several dialog windows adding a "Responsive Visibility" tab that allows you to control if various elements should be displayed on different screen sizes.
• Dropdown menu manager - this plugin adds the feature to describe with the help of the CKEditor's configuration various dropdowns and populate them with desirable items.
• Drag and Drop Image Uploads - a simple, cross-platform (and free!) plugin for allowing Drag and Drop image uploading. 

That sums up the last week. If you would like to be featured in one of our CKEditor Weeklies, or have an interesting tidbit that relates to CKEditor, leave a comment below or contact us. 

Have a great week ahead!

Here is your weekly dose of CKEditor updates! Last week we were catching up with our community's pull requests on Github. We also managed to launch the preview of CKFinder 3 and Accessibility Checker. Read on for more!

CKEditor in Review

• We managed to catch up with community’s pull requests on Github and we are happy to see an increasing number of quality pull requests. We really appreciate pull requests that already include tests, otherwise we cannot merge them until tests are added. Whether you are a consistent contributor to CKEditor or a part-time supporter, please make sure that you read our guides on contributing code and our testing environment.
• New search engine was introduced on CKEditor and CKSource websites last week. It's based on Google Custom Search and not only queries our websites but also other related resources such as our documentation pages. Thanks to this update, our search results are more accurate.

Other Projects

CKFinder 3

Last week was special for CKFinder as the whole team worked on the final preparation for the CKFinder 3 Preview launch. After cleaning up the API, polishing the documentation, the CKFinder 3 Preview website was launched on Thursday.

CKFinder 3 introduced plenty of new features and improvements:

• Support for cloud/remote storage, including Amazon S3, Dropbox, FTP.
• Compatibility with mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
• New skins, including "Moono" compatible with CKEditor 4.
• New "compact" display mode with folders being rendered together with files.
• Brand new image editor allowing to crop, resize and rotate images as well as set brightness, contrast, saturation, exposure and more.
• User-friendly slider in the settings panel to quickly change the size of thumbnails.
• Enhanced read-only mode allowing to use CKFinder as a simple gallery/file picker.
• Developer-friendly API with extensive documentation and sample plugins.

If you are interested in trying out the new CKFinder, check the CKFinder 3 Preview website.

After you get to know CKFinder 3 you are most welcome to share your opinion about it in the survey that we prepared. Your feedback to this survey will shape the future of CKFinder and your help is much appreciated!

Additionally, another way you can help us out is by providing translations for the user interface of CKFinder 3. If you see that your native language version is missing or incomplete, feel free to submit your translation. For translators that significantly improve any of the existing language files or provide a new language version we prepared free licenses for CKFinder with one year of support. You can find full details on how to provide CKFinder localizations in the documentation.

Accessibility Checker

Last week during the Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) we have officially revealed our latest brainchild - Accessibility Checker - which is closely integrated with CKEditor. Accessibility Checker is the first tool that enables you to check your content for accessibility issues and fix them before you go live.​ It is built upon three key elements:

1. U​ser interface​ optimized for quick problem solving
2. Flexibility allowing you to use the accessibility checking engine of your choice
3. Q​uick Fix feature​allowing you to eliminate common problems fully automatically

You can also learn more about creating accessible websites in a WYSIWYG editor from our latest blog post "5 Tips on How to Improve Accessibility When Creating Your Web Content in a WYSIWYG Editor"

Around the Net

• The ckeditor gem was updated to version 4.1.2.
• The Django admin CKEditor integration has been updated. It provides a "RichTextField" and "CKEditorWidget" utilizing CKEditor with image upload and browsing support.
• The latest Scald release provides support for the new widget functionality of the latest CKEditor library.
• Line Height - this plugin adds the functionality to set the line-height property of an element similar to the font-size.

That sums up the last week. If you would like to be featured in one of our CKEditor Weeklies, or have an interesting tidbit that relates to CKEditor, leave a comment below or contact us. 

Enjoy the upcoming week!

Once again, we bring you two weeks of CKEditor related updates in one piece. Read on for more!

CKEditor in Review

• Work on CKEditor 4.4.8 and 4.5 continues with 4 and 12 tickets closed respectively in both milestones. Just a few tickets left in both milestones combined, so we plan to start the testing phase at the end of this week or the beginning of the next week.
• CKEditor 4.5 API documentation is currently being reviewed and expanded.

Quick update on CKEditor 5 for the last few weeks:

• The initial documentation for the Globalization aspects of CKEditor 5 has been published.
• Working now on the design and documentation of the Data API. This will be the focus for the next period.
• More work has been done in the Document Data Model prototype in terms of stabilization and performance.

Other Projects

CKFinder 3

We are still pretty busy with working on the final release of CKFinder 3. During the last two weeks we were able to:

• Update translations: cs (Czech), da (Danish), el (Greek), eo (Esperanto), es (Spanish), et (Estonian), fa (Persian), hr (Croatian), it (Italian), ko (Korean), lv (Latvian), no (Norwegian).
• Add protection against caching issues after upgrading CKFinder.
• Improve keyboard navigation by:
  • making all UI elements accessible using keyboard,
  • adding support for more keyboard shortcuts,
  • ensuring correct tab order across the whole application,
  • ensuring correct arrow keys navigation where applicable, e.g. across toolbar buttons,
  • fixing leaking hotkeys in dialog windows.
• Significantly improve the look of focused elements.
• Fix various focus-related issues including:
  • incorrect focus on the first file in a folder if it was selected earlier,
  • restoring focus after viewing a file,
  • focusing elements in the Upload panel,
  • reserving focus on the Maximize/Minimize buttons.
• Fix the appearance of the Settings panel.
• Fix positioning of the context menu and disabling the native context menu.
• Fix refreshing root folders in compact mode.
• Optimize the perceived startup time of CKFinder.

Around the Net

• A new case study, which elaborates why Promisan chose CKEditor as its WYSIWYG application of choice for their enterprise resource planning system, has been published on CKSource website.
• Our Accessibility Checker has been reviewed on Opening Accessibility blog and mentioned on Accessibility Wins Tumblr
• The effective_ckeditor gem was updated to version 1.7.3
• Imgur - CKEditor plugin that helps you upload images to imgur in an easy way.
• Simple Button - create an HTML button that acts like a link.
• Chart - a proof-of-concept plugin that adds support for injecting charts into CKEditor.
• Read only Source Dialog - this plugin shows the html source of the editor content in read-onlymode.
• ACDC Placeholder - this plugin creates placeholder text which has click event attached to it.

Team Updates

We are happy to welcome aboard Tadeusz Piskozub and Szymon Cofalik – talented JavaScript developers who joined the CKSource team! Find out more about our new colleagues.

That sums the last two weeks. If you would like to be featured in one of our CKEditor Weeklies, or have an interesting tidbit that relates to CKEditor, leave a comment below or contact us. 

Have a great week ahead!

Here we go with the latest CKEditor weekly update. Major releases of CKEditor and CKFinder are on their way. We also had an important security update for CKFinder 2. Read on for more!

CKEditor in Review

• We worked on some final tickets for CKEditor 4.4.8 and 4.5. We closed nine of them and the remaining three are already on review. This means that this week we are starting the testing phase, and if everything goes smoothly, CKEditor 4.4.8 and 4.5 will be released on the 23rd of June.
• The tickets closed last week were mostly bug fixes, but there are also two new features:
• New method in the CKEDITOR.dialog API for setting dialog's state to "busy" (a spinner will be displayed) – see ticket #13213.
• A convenient way to listen to widget events through the widgets repository – see ticket #13337
• We checked again how CKEditor works on Microsoft Edge - the successor of Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, the browser is not ready yet and working with its developer tools is nearly impossible, so we were only able to confirm that CKEditor works on this browser, but we were not able to work on few issues that we discovered. We will get back to Microsoft Edge as soon as it is stable enough.

Other Projects

CKFinder 3

The final release of CKFinder 3 is really close. During the last week we were able to:

• Fix issues with storage adapters: FTP and Amazon S3.
• Modify the PHP connector to allow configuring resource type that points to the root folder of a defined backend.
• Fix keyboard navigation in the settings panel.
• Fix issue with rendering "Show More" button in a wrong place.
• Update automated tests to work with the latest code.
• Clean up stylesheets used to render panels.
• Fix issue with showing a broken image for a fraction of second when viewing images.
• Updated the French localization.

We also had some updates of CKFinder 2:

• A security update of CKFinder for ASP.NET (2.5.0.1) has been released.
• A minor bug fix of CKFinder for ColdFusion (2.5.0.1) has been released.

Around the Net

• The ckeditor_rails gem has been updated to version 4.4.8
• Video snapshot - this plugin enables adding video snapshot from the URL.

Team Updates

We are happy to welcome aboard Aleksandra Osiak who will be responsible for all financial matters and supporting management in business decision making. Find out more about our new colleague.

That sums up the last week. If you would like to be featured in one of our CKEditor Weeklies, or have an interesting tidbit that relates to CKEditor, leave a comment below or contact us. 

Enjoy the upcoming week!

This week we crossed an amazing milestone reaching 15 million downloads of CKEditor historically (check the website footer). In 2014 alone we had 3 million downloads! Impressive!

Thanks community! Congratulations to the CKEditor Team!!!

What this means?

Answer 1: The most popular editor out there (?)
I’m sure it is not easy to have such numbers. Especially for software like CKEditor, which in reality is not downloaded by end-users but by the heroes-in-the-middle (love!), developers and integrators, who are responsible for including it inside their solutions.

Answer 2: Number of users (???)
This is one of the questions I hear the most and it is one of the hardest to answer: “How many people use CKEditor?”

I always talk about download numbers when replying to this, because this is in fact the only really measurable variable.

But let’s have some fun and play with numbers:

• Last month we had 220,000 downloads.
• Let's say that 90% of this is not landing in any software (double downloads, testing, out of curiosity, etc). We remain with 22,000 solutions using the very last CKEditor.
• Let’s now say that in average each solution is distributed maximum 10 times (!): 220,000 solution distributions.
• Then let’s say that each distribution has an average of 5 users (!): 1,100,000 users!

That’s amazing!

I’m not taking into consideration mass solutions using CKEditor. For example, Drupal alone is a single application used in more than 1 million websites. CKEditor is the most popular WYSIWYG solution there and it will be included in Drupal core with Drupal 8. One download in applications like this has the potential to be used by millions of users.

I’m not taking into consideration all solutions which already have CKEditor and that didn’t receive an update exactly last month. Probably not even one tenth of them did so.

I’m not taking into consideration that CKEditor can be downloaded in many other ways, which are not part of these statistics. For instance, our CDN stats shows 2.4 million requests *per day* (all files). CKEditor can be cloned from our GitHub repos directly. It can be installed with popular package managers like Bower. It is distributed inside platform-specific modules for different CMSs, e-commerce and blogging platforms, enterprise solutions, etc.

Saying that 100 million users are using CKEditor today would not be an absurd then.

Can I prove this? No! I can just talk about downloads :)

How Did This Happen?

I don’t think I’m the person to answer this. We should ask our users. But I can add some adjectives here that make sense: innovation, stability, quality, continuous development, trust! Hard to say. At least those are things I am proud of when I think about our project.

The most important factor may be innovation. 

We have a growing team focused on making CKEditor unique. They are creative. They are demanding. They are pedantic.

We have a huge community that collaborates a lot. They are extremely creative. They are extremely demanding. They are extremely pedantic. After all, they are developers, just like us :)

Both our team and our community pushed us to be always one step forward:

• We have the best accessibility one could have in an editor. 
• The best Paste from Word results. 
• We produce quality content thanks to Advanced Content Filter (ACF). 
• Complex content previously impossible to be created can now be easily produced with Widgets.
• A great companion file browser like CKFinder.
• Unique solutions like the Accessibility Checker.
• Wonderful documentation and a great showcase of editor features in CKEditor SDK!
• CKSource: a strong company behind the project, offering quality services that satisfy the demand for a complete solution.

The Next 15 Million

We did it well in the past. We are doing it great today. But the future will be brilliant! 

Right now we are releasing CKEditor 4.5. This is one of the most impressive releases of CKEditor in the last months. It introduces great unique features with the top quality on details we are used to have. Don’t miss it!

We started discussing CKEditor 4.6. We’re going to make our ideas public as soon as the 4.5 goes out. We have great plans for it with focus on UX and further enhancements to the content generated by CKEditor for the modern web.

At the same time we started CKEditor 5. Like previous major releases of CKEditor it will be a groundbreaker. We are talking about a top notch modern solution to solve **all** requirements when it comes to online editing. Think about devices. Think about the new web. Think about all use cases for editing. It will be exactly that… and probably much more ;)

This is exciting! Stay tuned!

Thank You!

Let me stress that this success would not be possible without our beloved community. Your feedback pointing out issues and giving suggestions. Your help coding and translating CKEditor. Your participation in advocating the project and helping others. All of this empowers us and keeps us focused on delivering the WYSIWYG editor of your choice.

Thank you, and now we’re off to celebrate :)

Here is another CKEditor weekly update. We are still working on our CKEditor and CKFinder major releases. Last week we have also celebrated 15 million downloads of CKEditor! Read on for more.

CKEditor in Review

• CKEditor team is working hard towards an upcoming release of 4.4.8 and 4.5, finalising the features, fixing the issues, improving stability of the editor and testing. We are doing our best to have both versions released by the end of this week, so keep your fingers crossed!
• We are also thrilled to announce that version 4.5 will come with the Auto Media Embed plugin, an extension to speed up the process of extending editor contents with external media. The plugin converts links to media into embeddable content on the fly. See the video to learn more.
• Friday last week we have celebrated 15,000,000 of CKEditor downloads. Thank you for being a part of this journey!

Other Projects

CKFinder 3

The final release of CKFinder 3 is really close - we are completing the testing phase. Last week we were able to:

• Fix issues related to trying to perform an operation on a file/folder that no longer exists.
• Fix some edge cases during file uploads.
• Fix issues with CKFinder not being able to work with disabled thumbnails support.
• Further improve the keyboard navigation, including making the "More" dropdown menu keyboard accessible and making it possible to deselect a file using space.
• Create a documentation article about using requests in CKFinder and related ImageInfo plugin.
• Update translations: Czech, Brazilian Portuguese, Esperanto, Estonian, French, German, Polish, Serbian.

Around the Net

• Watch the screencast presenting a brand new addon that enables you to use CKEditor within Ember.js framework.
• ProcessWire introduces support for CKEditor fields.
• Wysiwyg Fields - a module that bridges the gap between Drupal fields and CKEditor, giving the power of Drupal’s field system via the simple usability of a CKEditor dialog.
• Video Detector - this plugin allows you to insert videos from Youtube, Vimeo or Dailymotion only pasting an URL or embed code. The inserted videos will catch the full CKEditor width and will be fully responsive.

That sums up the last week. If you would like to be featured in one of our CKEditor Weeklies, or have an interesting tidbit that relates to CKEditor, leave a comment below or contact us. 

Enjoy the upcoming week!

Here is your CKEditor weekly update. We are almost there – CKEditor and CKFinder major releases will be out this week! We are also very close to the first major release of Accessibility Checker. Read on for more.

CKEditor in Review

Having finished the testing phase, the CKEditor team focused on samples and documentation and giving the final touch to the code. We are really excited – now it is downhill all the way to the releases of CKEditor 4.4.8 and 4.5.

While CKEditor 4.4.8 is mostly focused on optimisation and bug fixes, version 4.5 comes with 10 new plugins, which bring new exciting features to the editor eg. uploading pasted and dropped images, embedding rich media into editor content and nested widgets.

Both releases are scheduled for this week and they will be announced on our blog.

Other Projects

CKFinder 3

The final release of CKFinder 3 is scheduled for this week. Last week we were able to:

• Improve the design of dialog windows for Copying/Moving Files.
• Fix compatibility with mobile devices when CKFinder is launched in a modal dialog window.
• Fix refreshing the list of folders when F5/Ctrl+R is pressed.
• Make viewing rendered thumbnails more user friendly.
• Fix the look of select/radio elements in the Settings Panel.
• Make maximized CKFinder window less confusing while editing images.
• Fix issues with uploading images in IE9.
• Fix compatibility issues with running inside Private Window in Safari.
• Improve caching of image previews, especially important on cloud backends. Caching period is now configurable.
• Fix issue with the Image Edit feature creating incorrect images (PNG files with JPG extension are no longer created).

Accessibility Checker

We are approaching the date of the first major release of the CKEditor web accessibility checking feature. Last week we were able to:

• Add an extra assessment imgWithEmptyAlt that is detecting decorative images and reminds the user that empty alternative text should only be used for decorative images.
• Improve ImgAlt Quick Fix - it will now allow setting empty alternative text.
• Add an extra Quick Fix ImgAltNonEmpty based on ImgAlt that will not allow empty alternative text.

Around the Net

• A new case study, which elaborates why WeSustain chose CKEditor as its WYSIWYG text editor of choice for their enterprise sustainability management system, has been published on the CKSource website.
• Layout Manager - this plugin adds various grids.
• Base widget plugin - this plugin allows you to use, reuse, override and define functions. It also lets you decide which nested functions will be exucted in the base.

That sums up the last week. If you would like to be featured in one of our CKEditor Weeklies, or have an interesting tidbit that relates to CKEditor, leave a comment below or contact us. 

Have a great week ahead!

We would like to announce the release of CKEditor 4.4.8, the last version in the CKEditor 4.4.* line that contains over 20 issues fixed, from accessibility improvements to API documentation updates. This editor version also includes a security fix for the HTML parser, so an upgrade is highly recommended!

Security Issue Fixed

CKEditor 4.4.8 fixes an XSS vulnerability in the HTML parser reported by Dheeraj Joshi and Prem Kumar. The vulnerability stemmed from the fact that it was possible to execute XSS inside the CKEditor source area after persuading the victim to: (i) switch CKEditor to source mode, then (ii) paste a specially crafted HTML code, prepared by the attacker, into the opened CKEditor source area, and (iii) switch back to WYSIWYG mode. Although this is an unlikely scenario, we recommend to upgrade to the latest editor version.

Community Contributions

It is really amazing that a third of the 25 tickets that went into this release was provided by the community. We are happy to see both the number and the quality of the pull requests submitted to the official CKEditor repository constantly increase and would like to thank all contributors for their help.

All in all, the core development team is trying hard to make the patch review process as quick and efficient as possible and is very grateful for all contributions. If you would like to submit your patch, too, check the Contributing Code article in our documentation. If you are not ready to write your own CKEditor code, you can help our project in different ways, e.g. by reporting issues, translating CKEditor into your native language, sharing your custom plugins or helping fellow developers at Stack Overflow. Thank you!

CKEditor Fixes

This editor release contains 25 improvements and bug fixes and is the last minor release that precedes CKEditor 4.5 (also announced today). Since accessibility is (and has always been) a priority for us, we improved keyboard navigation in dialog windows with multiple tabs which was not following ARIA Authoring Practices. Other issues fixed include incorrect structure created when merging a block into a list item on Backspace and Delete, error when inserting a hidden field into the editing area and issue with links lost when editing a linked image with the Link tab disabled.

Changelog

Check out the What's New? page for the full list of changes.

Download

Download CKEditor now and upgrade your installation or use your favorite package manager to install it!

License

CKEditor is available under Open Source and Commercial licenses. Full details can be found on our license page.

Reporting Issues and Contributing

Please use the CKEditor Development website to report issues and suggestions through tickets. You can also contribute code and provide editor patches through pull requests.

Support

Community support is available through Stack Overflow. Visit the support page for additional options.

We are happy to announce the most awaited release of CKEditor 4.5, the next major editor version that introduces an entire spectrum of amazing new features and improvements and is the biggest release since CKEditor 4.0. The CKEditor team has been working on this ground-breaking release for the last year, polishing the beta version as much as we could during the last couple of weeks, and we are extremely proud to be able to finally deliver the final version to the general public!

New Features in a Nutshell

With an astounding number of 157 tickets, 29k changed lines of code and 10 totally new plugins it will be impossible to describe all the goodies that this release introduces. Since we are introducing so many new features at once, a couple of weeks ago we decided to release a beta version to let everyone get familar with them. As a result, this blog post also covers some features and changes that you could have previously seen in the beta version. But bear with us for a moment, because the final version brings even more features! We encourage you to read the changelog (make sure to check 4.5 Beta as well) for all details and here goes a short excerpt of what CKEditor 4.5 has to offer.

First, let us recap changes that were introduced in the beta version:

• There are new end-user related features like support for uploading dropped and pasted images, embedding media and support for nesting widgets (inserting widgets into other widget's nested editables).
• There are new toolbar configurators and a redefined editor sample that from now on will be shipped with every CKEditor installation package. These tools are aimed at simplifying the editor integration and configuration.
• There are useful components like notifications, notification aggregator, file tools and the upload widget which will allow developers to build new, rich features.
• There are low level APIs like editor.getSelectedHtml() and a set of static methods in CKEDITOR.plugins.widget.
• There are uncountable other changes and improvements, many of them related to integrating CKEditor with the native clipboard.
• And last but not least, we have basic support for Microsoft Edge browser (also known as Project Spartan), although due to this browser's instability at the moment, we could not test the editor properly yet. We will work on remaining small glitches in the minor releases following CKEditor 4.5.

Additionally, the final version of CKEditor 4.5 brings nearly 40 bug fixes and a few other changes. Notable ones are:

• We made the CKEDITOR.env.isCompatible flag a blacklist rather than a whitelist. This should solve a few issues with CKEditor being disabled in some environments, including mobile ones.
• We added the dialog#setState() method and used it in the Media Embed dialog window to indicate that a resource is being loaded.
• Support for pasting links that convert into embeddable resources on the fly was added thanks to the Auto Embed plugin.
• We reviewed vendor prefixes in CSS skin files which allowed to drop a few kilobytes from all CKEditor installation packages.
• Compatibility of editor skins (Moono and Kama) with external web page style sheets was improved.
• We added the repository.onWidget() method — a convenient way to listen to widget events through the repository.
• Various issues related to CKEDITOR.tools.htmlEncode() and CKEDITOR.tools.htmlDecode() methods were fixed.
• We fine-tuned integration with CKFinder 3 (which was also released today) to make features like image paste and drag&drop work really seamlessly.
• Thanks to community contributions submitted to CKEditor UI Localization Center, we updated the Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Faroese, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew,  Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tatar, Turkish and Vietnamese localizations. Huge thanks to everyone involved!

Again, the changelog is massive, but we are sure that it is worth reading and more importantly, it is definitely worth familiarizing yourself with the new features! Check out the sections below for some more information about most prominent CKEditor 4.5 features, with demos, screencasts and documentation links.

Uploading Pasted and Dropped Images

You asked and we delivered! The ability to upload images into the editor by dropping them into the editing area or by pasting images (and their fragments) directly from clipboard has been a long sought-after feature. Wait no more – since version 4.5 this is possible, and since a working example always speaks more than words, see the sample showing how it works in practice!

Note: The sample above relies on CKFinder, our in-house file manager, to provide the file upload functionality. CKEditor itself does not include any server-side code that would handle file uploads automatically so you always need a file browser (like CKFinder or your own one) to provide the missing bits.

Drag and Drop Integration

Uploading dropped images is just one aspect of an entirely new set of clipboard APIs and features like the upload widget, data transfer facade or notification aggregator. Thanks to all of them it was not only possible to implement uploading pasted and dropped images, but it will also be possible to implement custom handlers for other file types (including custom ones) as well as easily create a customized file upload feature.

See this sample showing an example of drag and drop of contact list items from outside the editor for a better idea of what is possible with the new APIs. In this case custom data type is used to store contact information which is later transformed into a custom widget upon drop into CKEditor.

Embedding Media Resources

CKEditor 4.5 introduced two new widgets, Media Embed and Semantic Media Embed, that handle embedding media resources such as images, videos, tweets, or maps hosted by other services. By default the two plugins use the Iframely proxy service which supports over 1715 content providers such as YouTube,Vimeo, Twitter, Instagram, Imgur, SlideShare, or Google Maps, but you can configure the widgets to use another proxy service of your choice.

As an additional feature, you can also paste that resource's URL into the editor content and it will be automatically embedded if the new Auto Embed plugin is enabled, too.

Check out the new media resource embedding live in action in CKEditor SDK and read more about this feature in the documentation.

New Sample and Toolbar Configurators

The old set of samples shipped with every CKEditor package was replaced with a shiny new single-page sample. This change concluded a long term plan that started from introducing the CKEditor SDK and the CKEditor Functionality Overview section in the documentation which essentially redefined the old samples.

Additionally, two toolbar configurators with live previews were introduced. They will be shipped with every CKEditor package and are meant to help in configuring toolbar layouts. This is a huge step forward in making CKEditor customization as easy and accessible to anyone as possible!

You can check out the new samples and toolbar configurators here!

New Approach to CKEditor Compatibility Checks - Better Mobile Support

The CKEditor core team uses an approach of progressive enhancement to provide the best possible experience in modern, fully capable browsers as well as in older browsers or browsers which do not support all required features. The list of officially supported browsers contains those which the CKEditor core team actively uses during the development and testing. CKEditor may also work in browsers which are not included in the following list, because due to the huge number of various environments available the team is not able to check all of them.

However, in CKEditor 4.5 we introduced a change to our approach in editor compatibility checks that are based on the CKEDITOR.env.isCompatible flag from a whitelist to a blacklist which should solve some issues with CKEditor being unnecessarily disabled in some environments (in particular, mobile ones), and thus:

• In CKEditor 4.5 and beyond, the CKEDITOR.env.isCompatible flag is set to true for all environments except the explicitly blacklisted ones.
• In CKEditor <4.4.8 the CKEDITOR.env.isCompatible flag was set to true when a supported environment is detected. When you, however, manually set it to true in your configuration, CKEditor would be enabled in all environments, including the unsupported ones, in particular ones that CKEditor is known to no longer work with, so be careful with this approach.

Changelog

Check out the What's New? page for the full list of changes.

Download

Download CKEditor now and upgrade your installation or use your favorite package manager to install it!

License

CKEditor is available under Open Source and Commercial licenses. Full details can be found on our license page.

Reporting Issues and Contributing

Please use the CKEditor Development website to report issues and suggestions through tickets. You can also contribute code and provide editor patches through pull requests.

Support

Community support is available through Stack Overflow. Visit the support page for additional options.

Feedback Needed!

We are really enthusiastic about this new, major CKEditor version and its numerous new features. We will be happy to hear from you and thankful for any suggestions that will help us improve these features and tailor them to your expectations.

After a short break caused by recent major CKEditor and CKFinder releases we're back with another CKEditor Weekly! The highlights of July were obviously the three big releases: CKEditor 4.5, CKEditor 4.4.8 with a security patch and CKFinder 3.0 for PHP, but now that these milestones were achieved, we are back on track with pretty exciting stuff! Read on for more.

CKEditor in Review

With quite spectacular CKEditor 4.5 released two weeks ago, the team focused on closing post-release tasks like polishing the documentation and building samples for the new features, some bug fixing as well as improving the usability of the new functionalities.

We published and polished the documentation and samples for the new editor features that were released with CKEditor 4.5:

• Embedding media resources with oEmbed sample and documentation.
• File upload through dialogs and drag&drop sample.
• Drag and drop integrationsample.
• Notificationssample.

Attention CKEditor skin authors! A new documentation article explaining how to make your CKEditor skins compatible with version 4.5 has just been published, too! An update is needed to make your skins support new features such as notifications and the "busy" dialog state.

We are also now back to coding! Some of the closed or active tickets:

• Related to character composition (IME) – #13377 and #11663.
• Related to auto embed and media embed features – #13419 and #13410, #13429.
• Fixes for a couple of edge cases in the new custom implementation of drag&drop.
• Fixes for Microsoft Edge (still cumbersome due to browser instability) – #13142 and #13143.
• And more – see the CKEditor Milestone 4.5.2!

CKEditor 5

Finally, part of our attention was shifted to CKEditor 5.

CKEditor 4.5 is probably the last such huge release in the CKEditor 4.x branch. Work on 4.x branch will obviously not terminate as we still have a few important ideas and improvements to implement, but gradually the team will shift more and more resources to the development of CKEditor 5.0, the future of WYSIWYG editing. Having CKEditor 4.5 ready, we're now able to start thinking about our next big challenge for real.

This week the team reopened the discussion about using ECMAScript 6, the recently approved standard. When previously discussed, the new features were rejected because mature tools were still missing. The situation has changed recently with more transpilers and integration tools appearing and every JavaScript developer is looking forward to start coding ES6. However, native support is still limited and unlike in case of some internal, server-side or independent tools, building an editing framework we must take into consideration additional factors like the ease of use, code size and perhaps debugging very complex algorithms on platforms which are not ES6 ready yet.

The discussion is still open as we're conducting extensive research around how building CKEditor for development and production environments could work. Feel free to comment.

Other than that, we are concluding research on the new data model and expect to start producing some documentation and coding it for real in a short period on time. Stay tuned!

Other Projects

The massive release of CKEditor 4.5 was complemented by the equally important milestone achieved on the CKFinder front as the first official and stable release of version 3 for PHP has seen the light of day! While we are humbled by the enthusiastic reactions to this important release, we have already started working on improvements, and thus:

CKFinder 3 for PHP

• Updated the Chinese (China), Croatian and Greek localizations, credit goes to NetRube, Kruno H and Aris - thanks, guys!
• Added documentation for upgrading from CKFinder 2.x to 3.x for configuration options.
• Work on CKFinder 3.1 was started.
• New keyboard shortcuts information dialog (planned for 3.1) was added.
• Drag&Drop on breadcrumbs and folders in compact mode (planned for 3.1) was fixed.

Accessibility Checker

This week we came with a list of Quail, our default accessibility checking engine, changes that we find crucial to extend/maintain Quail. Proposals are placed in the QUAIL Modernization Proposal. If you are interested to see Accessibility Checker live or read how it works, visit the demo page!

We are also happy to report that Accessibility Checker was officially presented at the SamenWerking‬ meeting organised by the Quality Institute of Dutch Municipalities. Our CEO Michal Pik and CKEditor's Benevolent Dictator for Life Frederico Knabben were there to present the Accessibility Checker and came back with plenty of new contacts and ideas!

Team Updates

We are happy to welcome aboard Szymon Kupś, an experienced developer with a real passion for JavaScript and web technologies. Find out more about our new colleague here.

Around the Web

• A new "Accessibility, usability and SEO go hand in hand" article - an interview with David Carralon, the Head of International SEO for Career Builder, was published on CKSource blog and immediately gained some traction in the social media.
• A new case study, which elaborates why AKIOMA chose CKEditor as its WYSIWYG text editor of choice for their offer creation and management software, has been published on the CKSource website.
• The following add-ons have recently been added to our repository:
  • Attachments - helps you attach/upload files to your server.
  • HTML5 Audio - a simple audio player for mp3 and wav files.
• The ckeditor_rails plugin was updated to 4.5.1.
• Yozons has released CKEditor for Vaadin 7.10.0 with support for CKEditor 4.5.1.
• The CKEditor Extended plugin for Elgg was updated to support some changes in Elgg 1.11.
• Django-ckeditor was updated to 4.5.0.
• CKEditor is now available for vTiger CRM textareas.
• phpList launches a new plugin system, CKEditor is one of the six first ones available in the first bundle.
• A new Modules Unraveled podcast discusses the Wysiwyg Fields module for Drupal which lets you use any field type as a CKEditor plugin.

That sums up the exciting last two weeks. If you would like to be featured in one of our CKEditor Weeklies, or have an interesting tidbit that relates to CKEditor, leave a comment below or contact us. 

Have a great week ahead!

Summer holiday season is in full swing, but the CKEditor and CKFinder teams are still working on bug fixes and new ideas for the next releases. We're back with another CKEditor Weekly, read on for more details!

CKEditor in Review

The heatwave struck in Warsaw and elsewhere; the team members tried to run off from it. Still, we are a bunch of tough fellows, and these two weeks have seen many tickets closed... and unfortunately also some new opened.

The 4.5.2 milestone reached nearly 30 bug fixes already done and a dozen tickets still on review. The focus was put on Microsoft Edge issues as it gets more stable and predictable with time as well as on various other annoyances.

Unfortunately, the team discovered a few disappointing browser issues, which gave their toll.

• Microsoft Edge creates unnecessary <div>s upon deleting all content. A very complicated hack needed to be implemented to workaround this issue because CKEditor cannot easily tell whether that <div> was created by Edge or by the user.
• Firefox's clipboard API lacks integration with external data sources on Windows which caused a serious issue in the Paste From Word feature. Mozilla works on the problem, but the CKEditor's integration with clipboard API will need to be reverted to the old pastebin until a patch lands in Firefox.
• Microsoft Edge's clipboard API does not seem to work at all.
• Microsoft Edge's implementation of the input event turns out to be incomplete.
• Finally, Microsoft Edge likes to crash when switching CKEditor to source mode.

We reported all the discovered issues to browser vendors and we are keeping fingers crossed for their resolution!

CKFinder

Work on CKFinder 3.1 for PHP continues. Among the features worked on during the last two weeks were improvements in file preview and the new keyboard shortcuts dialog. Additionally work on the CKFinder 3 Symfony bundle has started.

Apart from this, the ContextMenu API was updated, Danish translation was expanded (credits go to Kasper Christensen!) and numerous bugs were fixed. Note that a public issue tracker is available for CKFinder 3 - you can use it to submit your bug reports and feature requests!

Around the Web

• CKEditor core developer, Olek Nowodziński, was hacking the editor a bit in his spare time and here is the result...
  • Editable header that does not break with Enter key or pasted multi–line content: https://jsfiddle.net/540ckczt/
  • Toolbarless CKEditor instance done right: http://jsfiddle.net/oleq/Ljn9tfg6/

• Maarten Segers from Amplexor explains why content authoring has improved in Drupal 8 - the inclusion of CKEditor in Drupal core certainly helped here!
• Reinis Fischer published a tutorial that explains how to setup CKEditor for a Drupal website.
• Modules Unraveled video tutorials are now free - you should definitely check out the CKEditor series there.
• The new CKEditor toolbar configurator was integrated in the CiviCRM editor configuration.
• The following new plugins were added to the CKEditor Add-ons Repository:
  • Cavac Note
  • Quran

That's it for this week!  If you would like to be featured in one of our CKEditor Weeklies, or have an interesting tidbit that relates to CKEditor, leave a comment below or contact us.

We are happy to announce the release of CKEditor 4.5.2. This is a minor bug fixing version whose primary focus is to improve compatibility with Microsoft Edge, the new Windows 10 browser that has just been published. Apart from Edge fixes, a few notable issues in other browsers were also corrected and some improvements were brought to the new features introduced in CKEditor 4.5, including drag&drop, embedding media resources with oEmbed, nested widgets and the toolbar configurator.

Browser-Specific Fixes

Microsoft Edge, officially released on July 29, 2015, was at the heart of this editor release. The CKEditor team was actually working hard on Edge compatibility since the early preview versions of this browser and has already logged quite a few tickets to the browser vendor. Meanwhile, we tried to patch whatever we could on our side to ensure all CKEditor users will get the high quality experience they are accustomed to. Among the fixed issues were various “permission denied” errors or browser crashes when switching from source mode to WYSIWYG. The latter issue was actually debugged and fixed by Andrew Williams and Mark Smeed— another example, alongside a recent fix for the new toolbar configurator submitted by Colemanw, of the great editor community stepping up and giving us a hand!

Apart from Edge problems, this release also fixes a few issues in other browsers, including a critical fix for Firefox for broken paste from Microsoft Word and other external applications or a broken paste from Microsoft Excel and few other improvements for Chrome.

New Features Improved

Our last major release, CKEditor 4.5, introduced a slew of innovative features like drag&drop uploads, embedding media resources, support for nesting widgets, notification system and toolbar configurator. CKEditor 4.5.2 includes lots of improvements for how these new pieces of editor functionality work and how they are integrated with one another.

Changelog

Check out the What's New? page for the full list of changes.

Download

Download CKEditor now and upgrade your installation or use your favorite package manager to install it!

License

CKEditor is available under Open Source and Commercial licenses. Full details can be found on our license page.

Reporting Issues and Contributing

Please use the CKEditor Development website to report issues and suggestions through tickets. You can also contribute code and provide editor patches through pull requests.

Support

Community support is available through Stack Overflow. Visit the support page for additional options.

Besides fighting with the current heatwave in Warsaw with the use of our office-squeezed lemonade, we were able to do quite an amount of work during the past two weeks. Here is your CKEditor weekly update! Read on for more.

CKEditor in Review

CKEditor 4

The last week was a usual quiet, post-release time which we spent on maintance tasks, but we have seen some activity on the issue tracker as well.

Two bugs were fixed so far and one small feature was introduced:

• Various issues with image selection and editing in Microsoft Edge were fixed.
• A bug where editor.getSelectedHtml() would return incorrect HTML was fixed.
• A new config.fileTools_defaultFileName option was introduced.

Other than that, we continued the work on Edge-related tickets as well as on a couple of improvements for pasting from Microsoft Word. We also implemented a new error logging system which is required to fix various issues with CKEditor API throwing uncatchable errors when used incorrectly.

CKEditor 5

Last couple of weeks were more quiet because of the holidays period and CKEditor 4.5.2 release. In the meantime we continued discussions around the data model and currently we are working on introducing first parts of it in the ckeditor5-core repository. Other than that, we did some maintenance work like updating dependencies and enabling ES6 in our tools. Next week we plan to bring Fred’s pull requests back to life by applying to them some of the decisions that we made during the recent discussions.

Other Projects

CKFinder 3

We are still doing some minor changes in the latest version of our file manager. Last week we:

• Continued to work on accessibility in CKFinder.
• Implemented various fixes regarding focus management.
• Changed the view of the Choose Resized Image dialog window.

Accessibility Checker

We are working hard to improve the performance of Quail - Accessibility Checker's engine.

For the time being we are done with jQuery reduction - we have created a document where we compare 3 different Quail builds to illustrate the benefits of the reduction. We were able to bring an amazing performance boost when working with larger content or using more tests and obtain a very small difference when small content was used (or very little Quail tests used).

Currently we are working on further performance improvements for Quail core and this week we were able to observe desired performance boost for evaluating small content, too. Current tests show that the checking time is dropping from 1.6 seconds down to 0.6 second.

Bender

• New version was released this week with one small fix.
• We also resumed work on a couple of improvements and we plan to release version 1.0.0 soon!

Around the Net

• A new case study, which elaborates why CoreMedia chose CKEditor as its WYSIWYG text editor of choice, has been published on CKSource website.
• Django admin CKEditor integration has been updated to 4.5.1
• A Ruby plugin that allows you to easily drop CKEditor into ActiveAdmin has been released.
• Here is a small modification for a better UX in CKEditor by Kray Mitchell.
• New plugins were added to the CKEditor Add-ons Repository:
  • Image Uploader and Browser - This plugin allows you to upload images easily to your server and add automatically to CKEditor.
  • Box Shadow plugin - This plugin adds shadows to your content without editing the source code.
  • Bootstrap Alert plugin - This plugin adds bootstrap alert to your write-ups without editing the source code.
  • Markdown plugin - Enables the Markdown mode in CKEditor. Moreover, your article in WYSIWYG mode can be translated to Markdown.

That sums up the last week. If you would like to be featured in one of our CKEditor Weeklies, or have an interesting tidbit that relates to CKEditor, leave a comment below or contact us. 

Have a great week ahead!

Here is your CKEditor weekly update. Find out about the upcoming release of CKEditor and our debut on Medium. Read on for more.

CKEditor in Review

CKEditor 4

The team is closing the 4.5.3 milestone, which includes minor bug fixes and stability improvements.

This milestone fixes a number of issues in the Paste From Word plugin ( #8780, #11215, #12762, #13590) and brings several enhancements to the file upload system:

• Introduced the config.fileTools_defaultFileName configuration option to allow the default file name for paste uploads (#13501).
• Allowed the upload of bitmap (.bmp) image files (#13603).

The exact release date is yet to be announced as it depends on QA testing. However, 4.5.3 is expected to be released this week, which will be announced on the blog.

We are also excited that Firefox 40.0 fixed the regression that made content editing in widget editables impossible. More information about the bug can be found in #13507.

Other Projects

CKFinder 3

We are focusing on the upcoming release of CKFinder 3.1. Currently we are working on performance and user experience improvements, especially important for remote storages. Last week we:

• Added a brand new Kurdish localization, as provided by Hozha Koyi. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Hozha for her work on translating both CKEditor and CKFinder - it's much appreciated!
• Added a file caching mechanism which improves loading times for slow and remote backends.

Bender

• New version was released with several fixes and changes, focusing on HTTPS support.

Around the Net

• We have started our own publication on Medium and went live with these two articles:
  • What we’ve all learned from running Geek Girls Carrots JavaScript workshops.
  • ContentEditable — The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
• Learn How to Make a Perfect, Responsive, Touch-Screen Compatible WYSIWYG Experience for Drupal Using CKEditor - a great article by Bitcookie Web Design Studio.
• A very nice series of CKEditor tutorials has surfaced on YouTube - these are created by University of Iowa for their faculty that is using a Drupal based platform for creating websites.
• Token Insertion plugin - this plugin allows you to insert tokens into the CKEditor for replacement with data.

That sums up the last week. If you would like to be featured in one of our CKEditor Weeklies, or have an interesting tidbit that relates to CKEditor, leave a comment below or contact us. 

Have a great week ahead!

Every once in a while some developer notices that there’s still no perfect WYSIWYG editor for the web on the market and then this happens:

How hard can it be? We’ve got contentEditable, execCommand() and queryCommandState(). Now, let’s just add some toolbar with stylish buttons to enable applying bold and linking the text. We’ll work a bit on typography, use some trendy SVG / font icons for the buttons, add some CSS transitions here and there and we are mostly ready. Right?

Not exactly...

Find out more from this article on Medium, written by CKEditor Lead Developer, Piotrek Koszuliński.

We are happy to announce the release of CKEditor 4.5.3. This is the third minor release of the 4.5.x line focusing on bug fixes and stability improvements. Among the features that were polished in this editor version is the Paste from Word functionality which CKEditor is renowned for due to its quality and faithfulness to original content styles and formats. There is also a new configuration option for paste uploads available as well as support for drag&drop of BMP files. Read on for more!

CKEditor Fixes

This release brings a number of enhancements to the Paste from Word plugin, improving document parsing, content clean-up and error handling. The update is therefore recommended for users who work with the plugin and expect the best compatibility with external text editors. CKEditor is regularly praised for the quality of its Paste from Word solution which is often listed as a deciding factor when choosing a WYSIWYG editor, so we take particular care of this feature and try to polish it whenever we have a chance.

Among other notable changes, version 4.5.3 introduces a new config.fileTools_defaultFileName configuration option to change the default file name for paste uploads and enables drag and drop of BMP image files (.bmp) into the editor, previously unavailable to the users.

Last but not least, CKEditor is on the road towards full compatibility with Microsoft Edge, fixing various issues with images in editor content in this release, including double–click editing and context menu support.

Changelog

Check out the What's New? page for the full list of changes.

Download

Download CKEditor now and upgrade your installation or use your favorite package manager to install it!

License

CKEditor is available under Open Source and Commercial licenses. Full details can be found on our license page.

Reporting Issues and Contributing

Please use the CKEditor Development website to report issues and suggestions through tickets. You can also contribute code and provide editor patches through pull requests.

Support

Community support is available through Stack Overflow. Visit the support page for additional options.

In our past blog post entitled “Intro to Customizing CKEditor 4” we have written about the basics of customizing your CKEditor version using the predefined download packages, CKBuilder and the Add-Ons Repository. 

We still notice that members of our community are confused when installing or upgrading their CKEditor package, so in this blog post we would like to highlight the 4 most common mistakes to avoid when downloading and installing CKEditor. Read on for more!

Mistake #1: Installing CKEditor Full Package and not using all of its features.

Decide which CKEditor functionalities are indispensable to your users and build your own package in CKBuilder instead of downloading the full package by default.

Here’s why you should avoid installing the full featured CKEditor without a real necessity for having its 72 plugins in your build:

• The full build merges all plugins into one big ckeditor.js file that stays unchanged even if you decide to block the unused plugins later on. You also waste a lot of time when you manually disable all the redundant features from the full package, one by one.
• The full build increases the transfer on your website and the number of queries processed on your server. Every action that the user takes when trying out a single editor feature adds up to the number of kilobytes downloaded from your server. These are mostly actions driven by pure curiosity and without any reasonable context (oh, I wonder what this button does…).
• Is having a toolbar with more than 15 icons in several rows really necessary? Your users might be confused when they see a WYSIWYG editor with so many features available, while their job is simply to format a text paragraph or add another row to the table.
• Do care about the final aesthetics of the content created in the editor. The content should be fully compatible with the websites’ design and purpose. The last thing you want to end up with is a perfectly designed website with user-created content that is full of out-of-context formatting (various fonts in all shapes, sizes and colors etc.) and extensive amounts of rich content (videos, images, tables etc.). Give your users only the most necessary tools and functionality to create content that suits the design of your product.

Mistake #2: Installing CKEditor Full Package and expecting it to have ALL plugins that we host in the Add-Ons Repository.

The full featured CKEditor package contains 72 plugins suited for your every possible need. However, please notice that these are only the plugins created by the CKEditor core development team which have been selected to become a part of a predefined CKEditor preset. This package does not contain any 3rd party plugins, which you can still include in your custom build using CKBuilder.

Please bear in mind that all of our predefined presets contain only the essential plugins for creating basic semantic content. If you want to use any of the extended functionalities of the editor (e.g. code snippets, media embed, mathematical formulas etc.), use CKBuilder to add specific plugins and widgets to your final CKEditor build. 

Mistake #3: Installing the wrong CKEditor package and missing out on the plugins you really need.

When deciding to go for one of our predefined CKEditor packages please make sure that you are installing the one which suits your needs and has the plugins you find useful. You can always compare the list of plugins included in every package by using our comparative table. 

Mistake #4: Installing large numbers of additional 3rd party plugins without doing a preliminary check.

Before installing a plugin make sure that you really need it and that it does exactly what you want it to do. CKEditor has a plugin-based architecture, however, all of the plugins have their own dependencies. There are plugins which serve the same purpose, but deliver it in a different way and can’t work side by side. The best way to install plugins is to use CKBuilder, which will resolve all plugin dependencies for you automatically.

Please make sure that the plugin you want to install is compliant with your CKEditor version and that it is actively maintained (the author replies to user questions and fixes reported bugs). CKSource developers are not responsible for 3rd party plugins - we just maintain a platform for sharing them, but do not test 3rd party stuff nor vouch for its quality. A plugin with docs, demo, lots of active discussions and source code is usually more reliable than a plugin which has not been maintained for the last two years.

One way to make sure that you won’t commit these mistakes is...

...to use CKBuilder every time you download and install or upgrade your CKEditor. 

CKBuilder takes care of all plugin dependencies for you and creates a unique hash code within the build-config.js file that enables you to either go back to CKBuilder at any time and start customizing your editor from the current setup or instantly download the latest version of CKEditor (Optimized) with your custom setup.

Here is a quick run through the possible steps you might take when setting up your customized version of CKEditor.

1. In the “Download” section on our website choose “Or let me customize CKEditor” and click the “Customize and Download CKEditor” button.

2. Select a preset that you want to start from.

3. Add any additional plugins / widgets / skins / languages.

4. Tick off the “Terms of use” box and download the optimized package.

In case you want to come back and add / remove anything from your build, please look for the build-config.js file with a URL containing a unique hash number that will enable you to recreate your build instantly in CKBuilder. 

Remember that the latest version of CKEditor is the greatest one. Since the process of re-creating your custom build is a piece of cake, upgrading your CKEditor with every new release should not be a problem.

We hope that this blog posts has shed some light on your CKEditor installation/upgrade problems and that you will actively use CKBuilder which can make your CKEditor experience a whole lot better!

Here is your CKEditor weekly update. Last week we have released CKEditor 4.5.3 and added some improvements to CKFinder 3 and Bender.js. CKEditor's Lead Developer, Piotrek Koszuliński, is currently present at the W3C Editing Task Force meeting in Paris - find out what he is doing there. Read on for more.

CKEditor in Review

CKEditor 4

Last week we have released CKEditor 4.5.3 and in about five weeks we are planning to release CKEditor 4.5.4.

CKEditor's Lead Developer, Piotrek Koszuliński, is currently present at the W3C Editing Task Force meeting in Paris, discussing the future of contentEditable.Here you can read the minutes from the meeting.

Other Projects

CKFinder 3

We are still working on the upcoming release of CKFinder 3.1. Last week we:

• Worked on fixing downloading files on iOS devices.
• Continued to work on accessibility issues.
• Did some minor UI fixes.
• Reworked the way of how long running task are handled - mostly for operations on remote backends (Dropbox, Amazon S3).

Bender.js

We have updated test framework adapters for Bender.js:

• benderjs-yui (added nested test suites)
• benderjs-mocha
• benderjs-jasmine
• benderjs-quint

All adapters now fully support nested test suites. We also removed regressions feature which is supported natively by test frameworks.

Improvements for Bender.js are still in progress, but we are moving towards the 1.0.0 release.

Around the Net

• Another article in our publication on Medium - "Fixing ContentEditable".
• 4 Common CKEditor Installation Mistakes And How To Avoid Them - A new blog post on CKEditor.com.
• CKEditor wrapper for Vaadin - This component provides a wrapper around it for use in a Vaadin-based application.
• How to upgrade CKEditor in Liferay 6.0.6 using hook plugin? - A blog post that might be of interest to all Liferay users.
• ckeditor_rails - This Ruby gem has been updated to 4.5.2.

That sums up the last week. If you would like to be featured in one of our CKEditor Weeklies, or have an interesting tidbit that relates to CKEditor, leave a comment below or contact us. 

Enjoy the upcoming week!

Here is your CKEditor weekly update. Last weeks were all about working on CKEditor SDK as well as closing a few tickets for CKEditor 4.5.4. Also, check this weekly for more news on where we are with CKEditor 5 and CKFinder 3.

CKEditor in Review

CKEditor 4

Two weeks ago, Piotrek Koszuliński (CKEditor's Lead Developer), came back from W3C Editing Task Force meeting.

Representatives from all major browser engines were present at this very productive meeting and it paved the way to contentEditable’s spec. We hope to write about it in more details soon.

For the last two weeks, the CKEditor team was working on CKEditor SDK as well as on a few tickets for the CKEditor 4.5.4 milestone.

• Two tickets were closed – no progress during upload and inability to use native context menu with the Div Editing Area plugin.
• We are reviewing support for Chrome for Android and as a result of that a dozen tickets were closed as already fixed plus we worked on improving stability of drop-downs.
• Last but not least, we started an attempt to rewrite one of the hardest workarounds that we have ever implemented - the good old inability to place selection in certain places in WebKit and Blink (yes, this browser issue is 7 years old). The current workaround causes a few of issuses that we were struggling with for a long time, so we are now looking for a more general solution to this problem.

CKEditor 5

We continue the work on porting the prototype of the new data model that we’ve created a couple of months ago to the code base of CKEditor 5 (see the WIP branch). The work will certainly take a few more weeks before it can be merged to CKEditor 5 master branch.

Other than that, as agreed a few weeks ago, we decided to start using ES6 classes as they are already available in many new browsers. We’ll also keep using other ES6 features which do not require transpiling to ES5 code. The existing code of CKEditor 5 was aligned with that decision.

Finally, we’re planning an article that will describe all the goals and ideas behind CKEditor 5, including important details of the new data model that we’re working on.

Other Projects

CKFinder 3

We are still working on the upcoming release of CKFinder 3.1. During the last two weeks we continued to work on accessibility issues.

We were also able to do a pre-release version of the CKFinder 3 bundle for Symfony.

Around the Net

• If you ever wondered how to use pull quotes in CKEditor, here's a nice example on jsFiddle created by CKEditor developer, Olek Nowodziński.
• Check out this informative video by DrupalCorn on CKEditor widgets.
• Here's how CKEditor helps in mapping the Roman Empire.
• FOEX v2.10 Public Release includes CKEditor plugin with image browser support.
• django-ckeditor 4.5.3 - Django admin CKEditor integration update.

That sums up the last week. If you would like to be featured in one of our CKEditor Weeklies, or have an interesting tidbit that relates to CKEditor, leave a comment below or contact us. 

Have a great week ahead!