It has been a while, and lots have happened in the last few weeks, so we bring you the latest update on our projects. Find out more about our progress with the upcoming releases of CKEditor. Read on for more!
CKEditor in Review
CKEditor 4.6 was released and CKEditor 5 v0.5.0 will be out this week.
CKEditor 4
CKEditor 4.6
The most awaited major CKEditor version has been officially released. CKEditor 4.6 is packed with new features such as a new default skin and updated UI, completely rewritten Paste from Word, new Copy Formatting, Upload File and Balloon Panel plugins, Occitan localization, improved keyboard shortcuts visibility as well as some widget and accessibility improvements.
The new default skin named Moono-Lisa for both the editor and built-in Accessibility Checker is probably the most noticeable highlight of this release. Moono-Lisa is a modern, flat, monochromatic skin that is optimized for accessibility, supports High Contrast and the UI Color feature.
Another great addition to CKEditor introduced in version 4.6 is the optional Copy Formatting plugin (included in the Full package). It provides the ability to easily copy inline text formatting from one place in the document and apply it to another. By default it allows to copy plain text, list and table formatting and is prepared to handle some pretty complex scenarios like nested lists or heavily styled tables. See the Copy Formatting sample and refer to the Using the Copy Formatting documentation to learn more about this feature.
Last but not least, the Paste from Word plugin was rewritten from grounds up, so it is now a much more reliable tool in terms of preserving Word document structure, styles, colors, indentation, element nesting or inline formatting.
Read more about all the great things that CKEditor 4.6 has to offer in the release blog post!
CKEditor 4.6.1
With the major version released, the team has switched its focus to the next milestone, CKEditor 4.6.1. This is going to be a minor bug fixing release with issues such as widget selection (#11064) and further Paste from Word improvements seeing some love.
CKEditor 5
CKEditor 5 v0.4.0 was published a while ago, with engine improvements and some new features like pasting support, autoformatter and focus tracker.
We are almost done with iteration 5 that saw the team engage in the following topis:
- Continuous integration for CKEditor 5 packages is now set up. Not only does it look great (we love green badges ;>), but it also significantly sped up our review process.
- We have added custom copy/cut support for the clipboard feature. It is important to have full control over what gets to the clipboard when dealing with rich content (like e.g. widgets) and browser quirks.
- First version of the image feature has landed. It adds image rendering and widget API to the previously implemented fake selection support. We will continue working on this feature and the widget system as there are many levels on which it needs to integrate with other features.
- We finished a huge UI library refactoring. In general, the refactoring allowed us to remove more than a thousand lines of code, which is a great improvement at this stage. It also significantly simplified the code.
We are also constantly working on developing a set of JSDoc plugins which will allow us to write CKEditor 5 API documentation in a simpler and more maintainable way. For instance, we added links and type references validation as well as better support for ES6 classes and modules. In CKEditor 4 we use JSDuck, which is an amazing tool but no longer supported and it is written in Ruby+ExtJS what did not allow us to take over this project. Unfortunately, we have not found a JavaScript API documentation generator which would fit our heavy use case well. We have checked a couple of available generators and decided that JSDoc is still the best one and that we should be able to make necessary adjustments through plugins. Not without troubles, but we managed to achieve satisfying results and we are now reformatting our API docs to the new format. We will share our solution with the JSDoc community once it stabilizes.
Other Projects
New CKEditor Website!
The release of CKEditor 4.6 was accompanied by the redesigned CKEditor.com website going live. The new website is a result of months of work — it is modern, lightweight, accessible and responsive and we also hope it will be loved by the CKEditor community. We also took this opportunity to rebuild the editor demos that now focus on showing some popular use cases where CKEditor can be utilized. You can read more about the new demos in the Example CKEditor Setups article and get their source code from the dedicated repository.
Accessibility Checker
Version 1.1.0 of Accessibility Checker was released. The most important update is the Moono-Lisa skin compatibility.
Around the Net
- The ckeditor-ruler plugin v1.2.0 was released.
- A CKEditor helper for CakePHP 3.x was published.
- The CKEditor Responsive plugin for Drupal was released.
- Online Web Schooling published a How to embed CKEditor in your webpage video tutorial.
- Cameron Gregor published two tutorials:
This sums up the last few weeks.
If you would like to be featured in one of our CKEditor updates, or have an interesting tidbit that relates to CKEditor, leave a comment below or contact us.
See you again in two weeks!