It’s now official, the source code for TinyMCE has been moved to GitHub. There are many reasons why we decided to move TinyMCE from SourceForge and Subversion to GitHub and Git and I explain them in detail below. Many other popular JavaScript libraries has already moved over to GitHub so we are not alone in this decision.

Community

One important feature of TinyMCE is it’s active community. We get a lot of patches and code contributions from the community a problem with this is that it’s hard to handle these patches. They might come in different formats and needs to be applied in specific orders etc. A distributed version control system solves a lot of these problems it’s easier for users to fork the project do their modifications and for us to then pull those changes back in to the main trunk.

Speed

A major problem with SourceForge has been it’s performance. It sometimes runs at modem speeds when we try to commit contents to their hosted Subversion. We could have moved the Subversion repository to our own servers but that would mean that we would have to pay for the bandwidth and also have to setup a web based source browser. So since we where to move somewhere we might as well look for other alternative SCM system as well.

Ease of access

One thing we really like about GitHub is that it’s focused on the source code. The source is not tucked away in some corner, it’s the central thing of the project. GitHub has a very easy to use interface and we are very impressed with it so far.

Flexibility

An important feature of Git and it’s distributed nature is that it gives us much more flexibility. We can now push the repository to different locations so we can host the most recent version from us at multiple locations. That means that we are not tied to use GitHub we could also host it as our own servers as an alternative and just push to both of those. We can also setup our own hierarchy for handling code contributions. We don’t need to add all users to the central subversion repository if they are core commiters.

Drawbacks

Switching to Git has also it’s own set of drawbacks. For example it might be difficult for some developers to grasp the Git concept, the learning curve is currently a bit steep. There are very few or limited visual clients available for Git. Some users has external references to our repository in theirs.

We wish that all of the TinyMCE users out there gets a Happy New Year. 2010 will be an exiting year for TinyMCE project and it’s users, we have many new things in the pipeline and are working on some new exiting sister projects that we are going to release as soon as they are finished.

The upcoming 3.3 release of TinyMCE will include many new features as well as some bug fixes. We will tell you more about these features ones we release the new version.

We also want to thank you all for your support. The community around the TinyMCE project is what makes it one of the most popular rich text editors out there and we are always exited to see interesting implementations, third party plugins and ideas for the project.

I went over the different CMS that won or became runners up in each category to check who uses TinyMCE. I downloaded the package or checked their online demo to verify.

Most Promising Open Source CMS Category

ImpressCMS – TinyMCE included by default.

Pixie – TinyMCE included by default.

Pligg – Not included, integration instructions exists, seems they have no default editor?

Best Open Source PHP CMS

Drupal – TinyMCE is a downloadable module (everything in Drupal is modules), seems to be extremely popular.

Wordpress – TinyMCE included by default.

Joomla – TinyMCE included by default.

Best Other Open Source CMS

Plone – TinyMCE included by default in upcoming release.

dotCMS – TinyMCE included by default.

mojoPortal – TinyMCE included but also other editors, not known if it is turned on by default or not.

UPDATE:

Overall best Open Source CMS

This category was announced after I made this post.

Wordpress – Already mentioned above.

SilverStripe – TinyMCE included by default.

MODx – TinyMCE included by default.

Source website: http://www.packtpub.com/award

Out of 11 different Open Source CMS, TinyMCE is included by default in 9 of them! If you make the same check towards commercial CMS you would probably find a similar figure. The download figures for TinyMCE on Sourceforge pales in comparison with the figures these different Open Source CMS has.

TinyMCE is without doubt the most used WYSIWYG editor out there, thank you all for that.

From version 4 of Plone, TinyMCE will be the default editor, replacing Kupu.

Rob Geitema has made some excellent work in integrating the editor into Plone.

There was a Plone conference covering (amongst other things) the upcoming TinyMCE integration, check out the recording on Rob Geitema blog.

Very nice integration work!

We thought we should share some info about some updates coming to TinyMCE.

The next TinyMCE release will probably be a slight jump in version numbers and have release candidates due to the massive code rewrite on certain parts. I won’t go into details regarding the changes, but it should mean even more flexibility, better performance, smaller codebase (not an easy achievement) and better sync in functionality between browsers. This update is still far away and there might be other updates in the meantime, but just so you know, we are hard at work with continually improving the editor!

On another note, we are looking into moving TinyMCE to Github, we haven’t quite decided it yet, still a lot to learn about Git, but it should mean that it gets easier for external developers to contribute code in the long run.

Also, some addition to the last post, After the Deadline spell checker is also available as a TinyMCE plugin, check their website! It is the best spell checker for TinyMCE hands down. We are looking into talking with Automattic about possibly including it in the base package of TinyMCE (get in touch guys!).

Check out this video of Wordpress new spellchecker, it uses AI to not only spellcheck words, but also check your grammar and make suggestion on changes to your text.

It is in by default in the hosted Wordpress, but can also be installed in your self-hosted Wordpress blog, it replaces the built in spellchecker in TinyMCE.

The spell checker is called “After the Deadline” and is aquired by Automattic, congrats to a great spellchecker.

Check out the plugin and how to install it here.

When developing large JavaScript project you need a way to document the API for the end users of your project. We have been using a Wiki based documentation for the TinyMCE project for a while but it had some drawbacks one of them it that it’s hard to maintain inline documentation and synchronize that with your wiki and it’s also very tricky update the wiki documentation if refactor your API then you need to change lots of referring links and a wiki doesn’t handle that in a elegant way.

So we started to look for existing documentation generation tools for JavaScript and there are a few out there but they all had drawbacks. For example YUIDoc was written in Python and our build process uses Java so mixing these together wasn’t really ideal. We also looked at JsDoc Toolkit but it tries to be smart and parse the JS code and since it’s such a dynamic language it mostly fails. There is also the Ext API documentation but I think their tool is closed and written in PHP so we couldn’t use that. And none of these wouldn’t handle all the things we use in the TinyMCE project it was always something that couldn’t be documented properly.

Since we didn’t find any existing tool that matched our needs we decided to develop our own. We developed a new documentation tool called Moxiedoc and it’s part of the JS Build Tools project that we are using for all our JS development. This documentation tool will only parse the JavaDoc style comments so it will not try to figure out what your logic is doing. The comments will generate an XML structure this structure will then be processed to HTML files using XSLT templates. It will also generate an intellisense JS stub file for usage in Visual Studio.

Here is a example of how the documentation might look for a class in a project:

The intellisense generator for Visual Studio enables you to auto complete all classes, methods and properties within your JS project.

So if you want to play with it you can find the Moxiedoc ant tasks and other tools in JS Build Tools package. Feedback to this project is very welcome since it’s our first release there is probably lots of things that could be added in the future.

Before the summer we added a new jQuery plugin and a special jQuery build for TinyMCE but we haven’t displayed or documented until now. The new jQuery plugin enables you to more easily interact with TinyMCE using the standard jQuery functions. This improves compatibility with other jQuery plugins such as validators and we think this is a must have if you use jQuery and TinyMCE together.

The jQuery plugin also adds a special tinymce function that enables you to initialize editors and get the editor instance by using selectors. This function will also enable you to lazy load the core script when it’s needed this is useful where you have a global script in a CMS or site and you want to load and apply TinyMCE only to specific pages and textareas. The plugin also adds a tinymce pseudo selector so that you can select only the textareas that got converted.

Here is an example of lazy loading TinyMCE only for textareas with a specific tinymce class.

// Initializes all textareas with the tinymce class
$().ready(function() {
   $('textarea.tinymce').tinymce({
      script_url : '../js/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js',
      theme : "advanced",
      ...
   });
});

We also made a special jQuery build of TinyMCE this build excludes the Sizzle engine since it’s already in jQuery so it was redundant to have the same logic added twice it also uses the jQuery versions of some functions but currently only some of the basic ones. Stefan Petre contributed some logic for this jQuery adapter however these patches wasn’t introduced in this first release due to some compatibility issues. Also we don’t want to replace to much logic since it isn’t a major gain in size and it doubles the testing time and possible bugs.

It’s also important to say that we have plans for similar adapters and packages for other common libraries but our time and also our knowledge of these are limited so if someone is willing to help out please let us know. We would also be interested in your feedback regarding the jQuery plugin might be things we should improve.

Another thing that’s important is that TinyMCE will remain library independent so even if we release this special jQuery version the main build still works without jQuery and can be used with any library out there.

You can read more about the specifics of the jQuery plugin at the jQuery plugin reference page in the Wiki. The jQuery version and it’s plugin can be found at the download page.

Well actually we have been back for a week already but we are taking it slow.

We still have a few large projects we need to finish before moving along this fall with big updates to the file and imagemanager, I also know there are some new things for TinyMCE as well, but as usual, mostly on the backend bit.

Hope summer treated you as well as it did us.

/Moxiecode

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