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.

In order to provide better TinyMCE support for those who need it, we have started a Partner network, and our first partner signed up is Ephox, they will provide support and commercial licensing for TinyMCE.

In addition, they have also commited resources to help out the community in a more direct way, by helping to fix bugs, answer issues on the forum and various other things. You might have seen Adrian commiting bug fixes on Git and answering some topics on the forums. Ephox has also setup an automated UNIT test bed that checks TinyMCE across browsers on different Operating systems as soon as something is commited to GitHub TinyMCE project. You can check out the Ephox Enterprise TinyMCE offering at their website. Also check out Adrians view on this partnership at his blog.

So why do we need this? Moxiecode Systems is a rather small company, we want to focus on the development of TinyMCE and not get bogged down with to much support and licensing issues (not everyone like/can use LGPL). “Outsourcing” these parts to our partner network and filtering bug reports through them will allow us to focus more on the needs of the community and future development.

Switching to GitHub was a major step in getting more social, getting more developers engaged in TinyMCE and making it simpler to contribute. This Partnership network is another step towards Enterprise customers that want more than just a community supported editor, they need premium support, guaranteed turn around times and many other things.

If you wish to become a partner, contact us and we will fill you in on how this works.

Moxiecode and TinyMCE is doing well, and we are looking for more ppl to join our team of developers. You can be located almost anywhere in the world.

These are the job openings right now:

Backend Developer

We need help working on the MCFileManager and MCImageManager products, an experienced developer could really help us develop some new thoughts we have regarding our products as well as develop new products and ideas.

Primary skills: C#, PHP

Secondary skills: JavaScript, HTML, CSS

Frontend Developer

Would you like to work on the most popular Open Source WYSIWYG editor in the world? We need someone who knows JavaScript like the back of his hand.

Primary skills: JavaScript, HTML, CSS

Secondary skills: PHP, C#

How to apply!

If you feel like you have the skills needed, send your application to info at moxiecode dot com with your name, address, current work situation and CV. If you are apart of some Open Source project or have code located in some public repository, send some info on how/where we can look at it and describe how you where involved in that project.

Social coding is the new thing, since our move to GitHub the community activity on all our project have increased, users find it easier to clone, fix, extend, patch and contribute to the software through GitHub.

The learning curve for Git is kind of steep, and we hope that more ppl will be able to help out when the tools (such as TortoiseGit etc) becomes better and more understandable. It can only get better from here.

We recently released a new version of TinyMCE (3.3.2), and we continue to review patches and contributions made by others.

Also, through a recent partnership we can offer better support and custom license options for TinyMCE, but more on that later.

If you wish to follow any of our products on GitHub, here is a link list of our current project.

• TinyMCE
• PunyMCE
• Plupload
• js-build-tools
• TinyMCE Compressor
• TinyMCE Spellchecker

Thank you everyone for all your contributions!

This new release adds better error handling with the new “Error” event. It enables you to handle everything from initialization errors to custom errors depending on server responses. We will add examples of usage of this to the site as soon as possible.

We also introduced a new ChunkUploaded event this is very similar to the FileUploaded event except that it’s fired when a chunk is sent to the server not when all chunks have been uploaded. If you trigger an error inside this event it will cancel the remaining chunks.

A new bytesPerSec property was added to the total progress. This allows you to display the current upload speed.

We also added new support for renaming of files before they get uploaded. This is a feature of the jQuery queue widget and will only be available if you disable the unique_names option and enable the rename option. It will only allow the user to rename the base part of the file not change the extension, how ever extensions should always be verified on the server for security reasons.

The Plupload site finally got a Forum. This has been a popular request by the community. So discussions regarding the product, news about the product etc will now be posted there rather on this blog. You can also follow the news using Twitter on our Plupload twitter account.

We sent out a recent survey with an update to MCFileManager and MCImageManager it it became apparent to us that some might need a bit of tips and tricks when it comes to certain implementation issues. Thank you very much everyone for the feedback you provided with the survey, it helps a lot.

Limiting write access

If you have other ppl than yourself that uses the software a good option is to limit functionality as much as possible until they request it. One good way of limiting the problem with users uploading files into the configured root folder (usually a website root) is to limit write access completly to that folder, but not sub folders.

Place a file named mc_access into the configured root folder and fill it with this content:

_filesystem.writable=false
_general.disabled_tools=createdir,createdoc,refresh,zip,upload,edit,rename,cut,copy,paste,delete,selectall,unselectall,view,download,insert,addfavorite,removefavorite

The underscore “_” forces the option to be local and not continue to apply to all sub folders.

Each configuration option in the wiki will contain example on how to use the config option inside an mc_access file.

Forcing formatting options

One common problem with users uploading images is that they tend to upload their 3000×2000 pixel camera images, any images larger than say 640×480 isn’t usually used on websites, unless you are publishing print quality pictures for press releases or similar. One way to force this, is to set formatting options in the only folder they are allowed to upload files, there are actually various ways to configure this, you can simple force a site wide upload.format option that places different sized files in different folders. This example is for use inside an mc_access file.

Create a file called mc_access in the folder where images are stored.

upload.format=640x480=%f_%w_%h.%e

This will create a file named <filename>_640_480.<ext> if uploaded in that folder (or any subfolder). The size will be forced to this.

One idea might be to have a main images folder, and then make 3 sub folders called “small”, “normal” and “large” and add different mc_access files to that folder for the different forced images sizes.

You can read more about the upload.format option in the wiki.

Directory templates

This is quite a nifty feature, when a user creates a folder, you can use directory templates in order to control what that folder can do and contain, that means you can put an mc_access file into a directory template! You might want to have a complete folder with sub folders when your user creates a new folder, so he knows where to put images and documents. Perhaps you want a certain index file, or empty submenu file to be included with every folder if you use it to control structure, submenus and layout.

You can checkout the configuration option in the wiki, also don’t forget that you can force your user to use these directory templates, and of course, if you configure using mc_access you can have different directory templates depending on where the user decides to create a new folder.

The MCFileManager also has file templates that allow you to copy a template file when the user creates a new document through the gui.

We hope these tips might help you on the way to implement our products with your own, good luck, and be sure to visit the forum if you have any problems.

This information will also be added to the wiki.

Three weeks have past since the first release of Plupload. The amount of feedback and contributions to this project have been amazing. So we send a big thanks to all the developers who have contributed code and send us ideas and bug reports.

This new release includes many of these patches such as better chunking support for BrowserPlus and a new HTML4 runtime. We have also added multipart upload support and more easily understandable buttons for the jQuery queue widget.

So download the new 1.1 package and check the changelog for details on what we changed and please send in any feedback and continue forking the project on GitHub.

We have gotten a few questions regarding the supported features of Plupload and what they mean exactly.

Chunking

Chunking is smart, it will allow you to upload files regardless of how large they are. Normally server environments have a limitation how much they can store in memory, normal upload forms put everything in memory and dumps it down when the whole file is received.  With chunking, you can continue to upload even if the memory has a low limit cause the file is chunked into smaller parts and saved every x kilobytes.

PNG and JPEG resizing

Support for resizing means that images can be resized by the client, before they are uploaded to the server, saving a lot of bandwidth. Lets say you are uploading your vacation photos, instead of uploading a 2560×1600 image it will be resized down to a more web-suitable 640×480 image, saving a lot of space and making the upload quicker. Also this will use the client browser to resize the image and not the server resources.

Type Filtering

By type filtering we simply mean the option to select only a certain type of files, such as only .jpg etc.

Drag & Drop

This feature has been limited to Java Applets for so long now, but support for Drag & Drop is starting to look better in more of these supported ways to upload and we will continue to monitor their progress.

Fallback

A good approach when setting up Plupload is to configure your runtimes as optimal as possible, we would recommend the following order of fallback.

• Google Gears (best feature support)
• Silverlight (good support)
• Browserplus (good support)
• Flash (good support, best client spread)
• html5 (bad support, bad client spread)

Once html5 becomes more spread and usable, we would suggest putting it on top.

Why Flash so far down? Well actually after Google Gears (our personal favorite) the other plugins all have their faults and are rather similar. If chunking is required for you, remove HTML5 and Browserplus from the runtimes since they do not have support for chunking.

There are a few more options/features but they are quite simple and you should be able to figure them out if you check the documentation.

On another note, we will be making an update sometime soon with better buttons for uploading, a lot of ppl seemed to have missed the little “Play/Upload” icon on the right side of the UI and clicked the grey form send button instead.

If you want to contribute, be sure to visit the project on GitHub.

Using Plupload you can upload multiple files using Google Gears, Silverlight, Flash, BrowserPlus or HTML5. Flexible configuration allows you to choose all or only some of these upload “runtimes” with fallback in the order you specify. The license is GPL for you to enjoy.

There are a few really interesting features available, such as:

• Drag  & drop.
• Client side image resizing before upload.
• Select file type filtering.
• Chunking to allow uploading huge files without any problems.

Want to try it out?

Check out the website.

Note that some features only work with some runtimes and browsers, check the feature list on the Plupload website for more information. Also note that this is a first release version and may contain some bugs.

And if you are interested in the source, you can fork the project on GitHub.

Enjoy!

The latest move from SVN to GitHub is one step in our effort to reach out more to our community. If you go to our TinyMCE GitHub project, you can get RSS feeds for commits and all kinds of stuff. We now have over 100 followers on GitHub!

Another step is that we have added Twitter links on our TinyMCE website so you can follow this blog and forum news. The TinyMCE twitter (www.twitter.com/tinymce) will also take all TinyMCE related blog posts from this website, and the Moxiecode twitter (www.twitter.com/moxiecode) will only take everything from this blog and not the TinyMCE forum news.

For a while back we have also a Facebook page, sign up to show your support.

We are hard at work tweaking the latest version of TinyMCE, and there hasn’t been any major bugs found in the beta even though this is a big rewrite of certain parts.