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:

EPIServer is a very popular .NET CMS in Sweden, unfortunately the built in WYSIWYG editor in EPIServer is really crappy and only works on Internet Explorer, but some handy ppl have created an adapter that everyone can use in order to get TinyMCE to work with EPIServer.

It integrates with the file and image software built into EPIServer. When we get some time we are going to look into officially supporting the integration of our file and imagemanager with EPIServer.

Check out this blog for more information about the adapter, and where you can download it.

Projects written in JavaScript gets more and more complex and after a while you find your self needing a proper build process similar to the ones found for Java or .NET. We recently swapped our custom tools for JS concatenation and compression to one based on Apache Ant. Ant has been around for many years and we used this build tool when we developed Java applications so it has a large feature set and is very stable, well documented and it can be used on multiple operating systems.

But before we could use Ant we needed to rewrite preprocessing capabilities we had in our custom tool as a ant task. Having preprocessor statements in JavaScript is a very powerful thing especially for large projects where you might want to exclude or include a particular feature for a specific build target. We looked around for some existing engine but we couldn’t find any suitable for our specific needs.

Here is an example of a simple preprocessor statement:

// #ifdef somedefine

someLogic();

// #endif

someOtherLogic();

The above statement will only include the someLogic(); call if the somedefine is defined when it’s being preprocessed. This is very similar to languages like C/C++ or C#.

This is how the above code gets filtered using the ant task:

<preprocess infile="file.js" outfile="file.processed.js" defines="somedefine,someotherdefine" />

We also wanted to use the YUICompressor to reduce the size of the script. There where a few existing Ant task implementations for this tool but we didn’t find one that was exactly as we wanted it so we wrote our of task for this as well.

Here is an example on how to compress a simple JS file:

<yuicompress infile="file.js" outfile="file.min.js" />

Both these ant tasks and future tools will be added to a google code project called js-build-tools. If you have your own ant tasks you want to contribute to this project please let us know.