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October 8, 2007

WYMEditor for TYPO3

Category: Zachary Davis

By: Zachary Davis

For the past couple nights I've been hacking away at integrating WYMEditor into TYPO3. For those of you who don't know, WYMEditor is a new RTE that aims to produce semantically correct XHTML output by focusing on what editors mean rather than what editors see. Here at Cast Iron Coding, we groan whenever a cient asks us to install the rich text editor for them, because we know where that road leads: tag soup, messy intermingling of structure and presentation, and display issues. To address this, we've started work on integrating WYMEditor into TYPO3. I'm attaching our initial ALPHA (repeat: ALPHA -- this should not be used in a production environment, and we take no responsibility for what happens if you ignore this warning) attempt at this project. Initial results are promising -- WYMEditor seems like a great tool, not just in terms of the solid output it produces, but also in terms of it's ability to easily pull in available styles from an external stylesheet, something which never seems to work as well in htmlarea as we'd like it to. In any case, you can find our alpha .t3x file at the end of this article. Feel free to install it in your sandbox site and take it for a test drive.

Let us know what you think -- if there's real community interest in this, we'll put some more man-hours into it and see where we can take it. Without a doubt, the biggest challenge will be to integrate the TYPO3 link, file, and image wizards into the RTE, but I suspect it's possible without too many modifications to the javascript source. Incidentally, thanks to Stanislas for his excellent work on the htmlarea RTE. The handful of hours I spent on this were made much easier because of his well-documented code, which I borrowed from liberally for this initial release. Implementing an RTE in TYPO3 is no small task, and I have a new appreciation for how much work he must have put into that extension over the last few years!

For more information, be sure to check out the following sites:

You can download the .t3x file here: download wymeditor extension

Article Cross-posted at castironcoding.com


comments

comment #1
Gravatar: Dominik Dominik October 9, 2007 09:33
Definitely worthwile. The CSS classes tool is absolutely brilliant.

comment #2
Gravatar: Peter Peter October 9, 2007 13:43
Looks very promising!

comment #3
Gravatar: François François October 9, 2007 16:11
That looks really great. Excellent idea!

comment #4
Gravatar: NiKo NiKo October 12, 2007 10:03
Super, pas un mot de plus...

comment #5
Gravatar: Mads Brunn Mads Brunn October 12, 2007 11:41
Very happy to see this. I started working on this a few months ago but didn't get very far. Eventually I had to leave it because I got occupied with other things. Looking forward to see your progress with this extension.

comment #6
Gravatar: Palahala Palahala October 16, 2007 12:23
Nice, very nice. But why is "Paste from Word" still required? I fear my users who forget to use that button...

For the other visitors: note that http://demo.wymeditor.org/ includes an older demo as well -- just in case, like me, one doesn't understand the "container" block at the right ;-) The older demo also shows a "remove classes" and some more.

comment #7
Gravatar: Charles Coleman Charles Coleman October 17, 2007 05:44
I personally love this idea and it seems to be a good editor. It appears that it could potentially cause confusion for those users who know nothing about html... or is this not intended for them?

comment #8
Gravatar: Michael Lauermann Michael Lauermann October 19, 2007 01:47
Looks very very good!
MAny thanks for future develeopment and man-hour on it.
:-)

comment #9
Gravatar: Zach Davis Zach Davis October 21, 2007 21:37
Well, I emailed the fella who made WYMEditor and let him know what sorts of interfaces we would need to make it work properly with TYPO3 (the ability to produce proper typolink tags via selection from page tree in popup, DAM and/or fileadmin integration for selecting images, etc). Haven't heard back yet, but I'll keep you all posted. If the WYMEditor team is willing to work with us, Cast Iron Coding will invest whatever manhours are needed to make this a stable TYPO3 RTE option.

--Zach

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