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.

We are preparing for a new release of TinyMCE, the first release this year actually, it has been unusually long between these two, but we have a lot of stuff to do.

The new Sizzle engine as been worked into TinyMCE, it is the same engine that JQuery and other libraries use. Integration is complete, but we still have code we can optimize to reduce the overall size first of all. We are working with John Resig the creator of Sizzle, reporting some issues we have found.

Spocke also updated the build process to use an ANT based build process, built a java based preprocessor (available on Google Code) and yuicompressor ANT task, very fancy.

Replaced the old unit testing framework with Qunit and rewrote all tests to match the new logic, this has saved so much time its incredible.

Also added a Team tab to our website, so you can more easily see who is working with the project, if you are missing, send us an email and we will look into it.

This issue has been resolved in the latest release candidate. So this post is no longer relevant.

They are pushing Internet Explorer 8 as a required patch when it will be released, so it is in all our best interest that all the bugs get fixed, currently there is one major bug concerning the styling of content inside the editor when the editing mode is enabled, they are not applied at all.

If you have an MSN or “Microsoft Live” account, please go to this page, sign in and rate the bug high so it will get some attention.

http://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=387549

(We have had reports that the link isn’t functioning, I am not sure if you need a MS “Connect” account)

Thank you for your help.

What a start of the new year, TinyMCE has been selected Project of the Month on Sourceforge. We are very grateful for the help we have received by simply using their services.

We are now back from some vacation times and should be up to full speed, if you need help with our products, check out the forum.

As a sidenote, on the 9th of January, our company, Moxiecode Systems AB, will be 6 years old!

Expect more blogging from us soon, Spocke has promised to make some more in-deep technical stuff to put up here.

When you first visit the TinyMCE website and check out the examples, you see a very advanced editor, in terms of the share number of functions. But as with most software, the real power is what is behind that graphical interface, the structure and quality of the code, the way it can be configured.

If you are familiar with Javascript, and go through the documentation of TinyMCE you will quickly get a smile on your face, when you realize the power of it all, from the way you make plugins, to how the the GUI is rendered and how the window popups are managed. And it is always a rush as a developer to see when someone has made a really good implementation and configuration, when you can see that they have studied the API documentation in order to bend and twist TinyMCE to function the way they want. There is even some that have stripped away all the theme/gui stuff of TinyMCE and only use it as an engine for their CMS directly by using the API.

The challenge as a developer is not to build yourself into a corner, don’t follow a path that ultimately will lead you to producing bad or bloated code. On the last rewrite of TinyMCE a lot of thought was put into how to avoid problems like that, and I think we did an excellent job, the code base feels very solid.

One example of powerful configuration is the valid_elements and extended_valid_elements options in TinyMCE, where Spocke invented its own format that has now spread to other projects, read more about the format on the documentation page.

The same goes for our other products, MCImageManager and MCFileManager, there is so much stuff going on behind the scenes in these products its crazy, we even implemented a form of .htaccess type configuration override (but we call the files mc_access). Means that most of the options you can set in the config.php file, you can also put into mc_access files to control the configuration for different folders. For example, you could make it so that if you upload a file to a certain folder, it re-sizes those images to a fixed small size, but if you upload to a different folder, you get a big image. You can restrict access to even upload, or disable certain functions in certain folders, and much much more.

So, check the documentation, even if you are satisfied with how it works, perhaps you can find some hidden gems that are extra useful just for you.

I am guessing noone has avoided noticing the financial crisis in the news, going through the world like a wave through an arena crowd. Can’t really say we have noticed it on our end though, this month will be a record in visitors for the TinyMCE website, as well as a monster amount of bandwidth being pushed out since we moved examples from the Wiki website to the TinyMCE website.

We certainly do not feel like we will be affected much by the financial crisis, on the contrary, perhaps the IT budgets are more slimmed and that makes companies look for Open Source alternatives, and finding that some of these projects are more structured, more tested and more stable than their commercial or home made version.

Currently we are busy doing major work on the MCFileManager and MCImageManager, planing to release 3.1 final during next week, with major behind the scenes rework of the graphical user interface, as well a few new features. We are also working on a secret new Open Source project we just came up with (stay tuned for that).

We will see what the future holds.