Yes, finally, we will be away during July, support will slow down a but during the summer, but we will be checking in on the forums and email once in a while.

It’s 30C in the shade here today, cya in August!

/Moxiecode Team

Microsoft launched Bing API a few days ago, it has a spellchecker API built into it, we where right away thinking of using it for TinyMCE, however Microsoft themselves beat us to it.

Check out this article on Channel 9.

We are trying to contact the author to see if it would be ok to peak at his implementation for a bit.

We had some wicked weather here in Sweden this weekend, lets hope it keeps up like this.

Haven’t been a lot of activity here on the blog the last few weeks, we are currently busy with a few huge projects that we need to finish before the summer vacation times. Speaking of vacation, during July our offices are closed, we will respond to emails and moderate the forum as much as possible, but don’t expect a quick answer.

The nominations for “Best Project” in SourceForge community awards are closed, the finalists will be announced on the 22nd, then we will need your help again with votes!

Enjoy summer!

We host most of our stuff ourselves, the TinyMCE website has been hopping along on a 2mbit connection for some time now and has been working fine even though we ship around 70 to 90 GB of data each month from just the TinyMCE website. For some time now we noticed slowdowns on peak hours, but now the connection is upgraded and should run more smooth.

Spocke is still monitoring the reports on bugs/requests regarding the new paste plugin, seems to be working quite well. Keep using Sourceforge to submit bug reports.

We recently introduced the new Sizzle CSS selector engine to the TinyMCE core. But I guess we haven’t explained much what it really means for the users of TinyMCE.

The Sizzle engine enables you to use CSS level 3 expressions when developing plugins and integration logic. For example you can select all paragraphs that matches a specific class or all parent elements matching a specific pattern. We used to have a custom CSS level 1 engine in previous releases but maintaining it was moving us out of focus for the core development of the actual product.

Anyway here are some examples on how to use the Sizzle engine trough the TinyMCE DOM API:

// Will select all paragraphs with the someclass and with the someattr
var nodes = tinyMCE.activeEditor.dom.select('p.someclass[someattr=somevalue]');

// Will select all parent p and div elements of the specified element
var nodes = tinyMCE.activeEditor.dom.getParents('p,div', someElm);

// Or check if a specific element matches the expression
if (tinyMCE.activeEditor.dom.is(someElement, 'p.someclass'))
   alert('Match.');

A complete reference of the selector patterns you can use can be found on the Sizzle documentation page.

The current version of TinyMCE has some issues with focus on IE 8 this will be addressed in the upcoming release. There has also been some rendering quirks in this new browser version. But it has otherwise not been any reports of IE 8 specific issues. It’s just a bummer that this browser is still so far behind when it comes to web standards.

TinyMCE has basically two types of code IE specific and W3C specific it’s a shame that even with this latest version it doesn’t have some of the core features other browser has. But I must say that IE is a very stable platform when it comes to it’s contentEditable support the things that work works extremely well compared to other browsers. IE is just old it’s not poorly written.

We recently merged the paste2 google code project into the TinyMCE trunk. We have been working hard on this new plugin since we think one of the most common tasks a end user does is pasting contents from standard office applications like Microsoft Word. The default HTML contents you get from Word is a total mess, some speculate that it is in this format to throw other browser vendors of track so they came up will all kinds of junk to beat Netscape and that junk is still in there.

Anyway, this new plugin makes it possible to auto detect word contents on normal Ctrl+V paste operations on all browsers. This means that you don’t need to use the old “paste from word” button in the toolbar. This button was hard to use for novice users and easy to miss.

This plugin uses lots of odd tricks to grab the HTML from the clipboard some of these tricks will be removed in the future when the browsers implement a proper way of dealing with the clipboard. There is a HTML 5 specification on how this should work and the Gecko and WebKit engines are pretty close to a good implementation of these specs.

We will release a new version of TinyMCE later this week. We just need to test it some more and especially the new paste plugin.

Spocke has been working hard trying to solve the issue with pasting in various browsers, cleaning up MS Office junk etc. The result is that the new paste plugin is now included in the SVN trunk and will be released with the next TinyMCE version sometime very soon.

On other news, Microsoft has implemented TinyMCE in their many forums, MSDN, Technet, Answers, Expression and the http://social.microsoft.com/Forums.

Jules Gravinese the author of the new CF Gzip compressor package for TinyMCE has come up with a new and easy way to use TinyMCE within a CF page. So if you are a CF developer you can read more about this new method of including TinyMCE at Jules blog. We will continue to post about nice third party development of TinyMCE related projects. So if you have something interessting to show us such as a custom implementation, plugin or system drop us a mail and tell us about it. We might just blog about it here.

WPTavern.com posted an interview with our good friend Andrew Ozz, currently working with the Wordpress team.

I suggest you checkout the interview here.

http://www.wptavern.com/interview-with-andrew-ozz-mr-visual-editor

We continue to listen to the Wordpress community (through our friends working with Wordpress) and are very happy about the intergration of our editor in this most excellent blog/site engine.

Need more ppl like Andrew Ozz, for other platforms, we can simple not handle integration with every CMS system out there, if you are working on integration with other CMS, feel free to contact us if you need assistance, we will help you out as much as we can.

Quite a lot of stuff happening, I have to say the IE8 release came as a surprise to us, we had hoped they would fix a few more issues before launch, feels very unstable. We where going to attend the IE development chat that was yesterday, but since the browser is out already, we find it quite pointless to push our issues further, even if they get fixed, this is the version we have to work with/around, getting quite tiresome.

As a result of this, new version of TinyMCE and our MCFileManager/MCImageManager have been released, fixing some issues with IE8 (and other things), check the changelogs on the TinyMCE website for more information.

One interesting thing about the fix for the imagemanager edit function, it hanged IE8, not just the tab, but the entire window due to a quite simple change in they way clone node seems to work. And here I thought they said that the browser could not hang, tabs are suppose to be separate instances?

Tip of the day: Want to use FF built in spellchecker with TinyMCE even though context menu plugin is turned on? Hold down CTRL while you right click the underlined word in Firefox.

We have seen quite a few TinyMCE implementations over the years but some stand out since they have some cool feature that impesses us. One of them is the TinyMCE Advanced plugin for WordPress created by Andrew Ozz. WordPress comes with TinyMCE enabled by default but only with a limited feature set.

This plugin adds all the functionality TinyMCE provides to WordPress but the feature that we think is really impressive is the way you can configure the toolbar layout by drag and dropping buttons and controls around in a nice user friendly interface.

We have seen that this plugin has become very popular in the WordPress community. So if you are a WordPress user we strongly recommend that you take a look at this plugin.

Here is a screenshot of the drag drop interface: