It has been a long time since we’ve started to work on the second version of our multi runtime file uploader. And here you have it finally – first public beta of Plupload 2.

Bit of backstory, since it’s quite complicated. First of all I would like to make one thing very clear, until it gets confusing – functionality of Plupload on a big part has stayed the same. Yes – it has gained huge potential for growth, but on the surface it shouldn’t feel to you any different. And this is actually good – ’cause if you feel the difference, then something went not as it was expected to and you should immediately report it to us 

As you might know, so far Plupload consisted of two distinctive parts – the Core (a small framework that made it easy to quickly implement cross-browser file uploader of any kind) and the Widgets – UI Widget and Queue Widget (two visually rich implementations of the Core and basically examples of Plupload’s potential). But while having a core completely separate turned out to be very handy, it still felt a bit constraining. For example it wasn’t possible to easily get the hold of a raw file data – to display thumbnails for example, or access file meta tags. Yes – Plupload was able to extract Exif and GPS info from images, but it was doing this on it’s own, without giving any control to the user. Another problem was that it was nearly impossible to control the flow of the chunks – resend them separately for example, if they failed to reach the server, calculate  checksums for increased reliability, and so on.

So the necessity was obvious – we required to expand the Core farther. But how? Provide more events and methods (much more in fact)? Or separate low-level file manipulation and upload logic into a separate set of libraries? The answer was laying on the surface, but felt so crazy that it took us quite some time to comprehend that it was the only proper way to proceed. So what we did in our major update, is that we’ve extracted all the low-level logic from the Core and wrapped it up in standalone multi-runtime and cross-browser pollyfills, that are closely resembling behavior and functionality of HTML5’s File and XMLHttpRequest Level 2 APIs!…

Now, maybe currently it doesn’t sound as crazy as it did, back in early days when we started, but believe me it still opens up some very interesting opportunities for legacy browsers,  that are still around (and not only). While working on pollyfills, we tried to follow existing W3C specs as close as it was possible in our circumstances, which means that our implementation of FileReader interface, or XMLHttpRequest will act and have all the properties and methods that according to W3C are expected for them to have. And if for some reason they lack some (specs were noticed to mutate quite often), let us know and we will take on them 

Therefore now we have three tier system: very first level – File and XMLHttpRequest API pollyfills, second level – Plupload Core and third level – Core implementations, like our UI and Queue Widgets. Bottom levels can be extended separately – just as easy as anyone can use the Core to build customized file uploader, pollyfills can be used to create all kinds of components and obviously not only file uploaders.

Currently we publish our first beta of Plupload 2. On big part you should be able to simply drop it in instead of the previous one and everything should simply work. But there are some precautions to take into account. First of all, we’ve dropped BrowserPlus and Gears support, mostly because their authors dropped them themselves. Second point to consider is the fact, that we’ve renamed .swf and .xap shims, since they are not strictly Plupload specialized anymore (they are now part of pollyfills and not the Plupload). So in the places where you reference plupload.flash.swf and/or plupload.silverlight.xap, you must now put correspondingly - Moxie.swf and Moxie.xap (as these are the names of updated shims).

That’s it! You can download Plupload 2 here. Together with minified Moxie (combined name for pollyfill code) and Plupload code, we bundle our Widgets. Queue plugin wasn’t touched, but UI got updated to leverage the power of new APIs and now is able to show the client-side thumbs (even in IE6!).

Happy testing. We are ready to accept bug reports and feature requests. Now that we’ve mostly done with the major update, bug hunting will get top priority.

I guess its been out for a while, Apple now uses TinyMCE in their iCloud email application with great success.

Was a long time ago they showed us the beta of the new iCloud and told us they wanted to use TinyMCE. They are also using it together with Sproutcore, with TinyMCE mostly just used as an engine for the editable field, much like Squarespace and others are doing.

Stay tuned for TinyMCE 4, it will be another excellent major update to TinyMCE!

If you are already familiar with Nuget’s for .NET this might not be so new to you.

Tugberk has created Nuget’s for various TinyMCE implementations (MVC, jQuery etc).

Check out this blog post for more information and some help on getting started.

Jennifer Lampton has a video of the DrupalCamp Austin in November 20th 2011, explaining some advanced configuration with Drupal, TinyMCE and different modules.

There is a lot of modules, issues and security to keep track of when configuring your editor to Drupal, she goes through configuring and adding some good functionality.

Check out the video on her website.

Of course, we would recommend using MCFileManager and/or MCImageManager with Drupal to make it easier to work with images

We at Moxiecode would like to thank you all for a great year and we are looking forward to another one just like it (but even better!).

Shoutouts to our friends at Ephox, for their great contribution to the TinyMCE code base.

Also shoutouts to the WordPress guys, congratulations on the 3.3 release, we now have 2 of our projects running within WordPress, both TinyMCE and Plupload.

Thanky you all for using our products.

Jake Goldman, chief engineer and CEO of 10up LLC posted a slide of his talk at 2011 Wordcamp earlier.

Showing some advanced work on how to customize and form the editor to fit your website better, using custom styles, adding custom buttons and styling the interface, a very good slide, wish I had heard the talk.

Check out the article and slides here.

Today we released a new service, to allow you to try different configurations and setups with TinyMCE, as well as aid in examples for our bugtracking system, we introduce TinyMCE Fiddle (fiddle.tinymce.com). Service is still in beta stage, feel free to comment and provide feedback in the forums at tinymce.com.

This service is heavily inspired by jsfiddle.net

The buzz around Plupload is huge right now, much more than we anticipated, and we are putting more resources into the continued development of Plupload and starting to create a community around it similar to TinyMCE. Over the next couple of weeks/months you will see a rebuild of the website so contain a wiki for the documentation as well as its own bug/feature tracker system (like the new one we are using for TinyMCE). The current website wasn’t built to contain so much content, but as the project grows, so must the website.

The new TinyMCE website is a huge success, ppl are getting engaged with the bug/feature tracker and submitting good quality reports, something we appreciate a lot and we no longer have to put up with the incredibly turtle-slow Sourceforge tracker system.

Just as a side note, many seems very interested in exactly when the new TinyMCE version will be out of Beta, can’t give you any exact date, but we expect this to be the last beta unless something unexpected shows up.

Me and Spocke is taking a trip to Palo Alto, California for a couple of days at the start of December (1th-5th) to meet up with some business and technology partners. We are looking forward to seeing the center of the IT industry, if you wish to meetup there for some reason, get in touch with us, our time is limited but we might be able to work something out.

On another note, we have a new employee, Davit Barbakadze has been helping us out for a bit the last couple of weeks and he is now a part of Moxiecode Systems AB. His main focus right now will be to incorporate some fixes and enhancements into Plupload and then move over to help out on TinyMCE development as well as other development.

So, 500 million ppl just got access to TinyMCE, sweet

And as you might have noticed (we tweeted about it) Facebook is now using TinyMCE in their “Notes” section as well as “Facebook Questions”.

We are now back from vacation since the start of this week, getting back into things again and we got a lot of nice stuff for the community comming up.