Strategies Best WYSIWIG editors?

[Husk]

I've been looking at various WYSIWIG editors. Kinda leaning toward TinyMCE at the moment but I was wondering if there were any other good options. I've also looked at CKEditor and Froala. I kinda want something self-hosted.

 

[Arantor]

Froala has issues; it's what XenForo uses, and it's *not cheap* at all. And if the commentary on the XF forum has been anything to go by, it's buggy as all heck to the point XF is going to replace it out in a future version.

TinyMCE is what WordPress used to use before Gutenberg; solid enough editor. I did like some of the other products by the same team but I never quite gelled with TinyMCE itself.

I loved CKEditor 4, haven't tried 5. (And I've been using it since before it was called CKEditor, back when it was FCK Editor, named after its founder)

All three are available for self hosting, TMCE and CKEditor have free options with paid upgrade tiers; can get expensive quite quickly but I shouldn't imagine you'd need anything that crazy.

I have (not in a long time, mind) previously written addons for both TinyMCE and CKEditor - the latter is much more preferable in my experience as a developer, and me personally I prefer its aesthetic. But go with the one that has the features you want out of the box; styling is fixable in all of them, functionality not so much.

 

[Husk]

Thanks! I'll look a little more into CKEditor! Price was something of an issue, which is why I was asking about them. I know there are free tiers and from the looks of it, I think it'd be mostly fine with the free versions (and there's always an option to upgrade if it turns out we need more.)

 

[Dismal_Bliss]

before it was called CKEditor, ... it was FCK Editor

I can see why they renamed it, lol

 

[Arantor]

Frederico Caldeira Knabben doesn’t have a problem with his own initials, but apparently customers did.

 

[Cedric]

I don't know. Despite Froala's bugs, I quite like the editor. It's easy. Formatting does bug out sometime, but haven't really found anything frustrating so far.

 

[Empire]

CKEditor is what I used, in fact that's what IPB use right

 

[Arantor]

I don't know. Despite Froala's bugs, I quite like the editor. It's easy. Formatting does bug out sometime, but haven't really found anything frustrating so far.

It’s far more buggy on Firefox.

 

[Arantor]

CKEditor is what I used, in fact that's what IPB use right

Yes, they use CKEditor 4 as far as I know though I think they’re planning to upgrade to 5 at some point.

 

[Cedric]

It’s far more buggy on Firefox.

Ah yeah, could be. I use Chrome and as I said, not ran into much issues other than a format not working.

Is it actually possible to integrate a different editor than the standard one used by XenForo? Like for example, if we'd want to upgrade to a better one on AJ?

 

[Arantor]

Is it possible? Probably. But it’d be a lot of work, like it was for Mike when they converted to Froala in the first place (they used to use Redactor)

 

[Cedric]

Yeah, thought so. Probably not something an average webmaster should do.

 

[Dismal_Bliss]

This is an interesting discussion. I never knew how one could use CKEditor outside of Invision, lol.

 

[Arantor]

This is an interesting discussion. I never knew how one could use CKEditor outside of Invision, lol.

CKEditor is a completely standalone product, you can use it in anything that accepts HTML. I used to use it in a corporate trade platform I built a few years ago, for its CMS module. It was also used for the email editor in that platform too, if I remember correctly.

 

[Empire]

Yes, they use CKEditor 4 as far as I know though I think they’re planning to upgrade to 5 at some point.

Yeah, they would update..

 

[Arantor]

It's not that simple, and I know Matt's talked about it before, it's not just a drop-in component. Upgrading a major version of CKEditor is like bringing in a whole new editor - it's not for the faint of heart.

 

[vbgamer45]

CKEditor has been my go to editior for most projects. Have used TinyMCE
SCEditor powers SMF and MyBB

B​

 

[Husk]

My husband went with SCEditor and so far, I frigging hate it. It keeps adding in extra <p><br> tags and even <i><br></i> tags. I have posted from my phone and from my laptop and regardless, it adds all these ugly extra spaces that I have to go in and edit out through the source.

 

[Arantor]

Hm, I wonder how SMF’s folks configured it because they use SCEditor specifically so it would cleanly convert to bbcode, not sure offhand how deeply down the rabbit hole they went because they don’t keep the config in their repo, only minified.

But they definitely fixed it to not behave like that (because it explicitly gets turned into bbcodes so no stray tags)

 

[Husk]

I wish I knew. He put in a bug report for it but it's driving me nuts! I still want to go with CKEditor myself.