Tag Archives: TinyMCE

Moxiecode’s April Fool’s Joke is Perfectly Reasonable

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I use TinyMCE in a few applications, so I frequent the Moxiecode page. Today I was there and noticed that their news feed had this headline: No more supporting older browsers starting 2010.

I actually got a little excited thinking that someone had finally drawn a line in the sand. It’s my belief that this is a perfectly reasonable stance to take. However, to my dismay, it was an April Fool’s prank pulled off by the Moxiecode team.

Support for IE6 in particular just kills me. It’s not a modern browser, and sites should be blasting out messages to IE6 users urging them to upgrade. For my part, I often use links to browsehappy.com in my page footers, and turn it on via user agent sniffing. The evolution of the web absolutely demands shedding the past, and now is as good a time as any, if you asked me.

Browse Happy logo

Check out TinyMCE

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If you’re a web developer who’s in charge of creating content management systems, there’s a great control you’ve got to check out – TinyMCE. TinyMCE is a free, open source WYSIWIG text editor. The beauty of it is that it’s feature-rich, it’s platform independent (being written entirely in JavaScript), and it’s extremely easy to configure and extend. It’s developed by Moxiecode, who also develops some very intriguing commercial controls. TinyMCE is actually the text editor that WordPress uses for their backend CMS (so, it’s what I’m writing this post on, by extension).

The great part is that TinyMCE is specifically designed as an XHTML markup editor, so the output of it can go straight into any web container without further down-the-line manipulation. Even better was a feature I was not at all expecting – you can style the text editor with a .css file and a css class definition too! This means that if you use your site’s stylesheet and it’s written well, you can get the TinyMCE editor window to effectively replicate what your site post will look like. Now, that’s a powerful feature!

Here’s an example of what I mean. This is a sample post from my other site, blaqdesign.com, in the content editor system that I’m writing for it. The great part was that these posts weren’t originally created in TinyMCE, but since they’re valid XHTML fragments, I was able to load them into TinyMCE with no hassles whatsoever. If you go to the site, you’ll see in this very post in the site news, and formatted exactly the same way. The background is the same, the text formatting and colors are perfect, and the XHTML markup is preserved. Now, I don’t have to worry that other people will make a mess of the site formatting when they’re creating content.

TinyMCE

If you’re interested, here’s my TinyMCE configuration I used:

<script>
tinyMCE.init({

mode : “textareas”,
theme : “advanced”,
theme_advanced_buttons1 :“bold,italic,underline,strikethrough,|,justifyleft,justifycenter,justifyright,” + “|,bulletlist,numlist,|,undo,redo,|,formatselect,|,cut,copy,paste,pastetext,pasteword,|,” + “outdent,indent,|,link,unlink,image,cleanup,code,charmap”,
theme_advanced_buttons2 : “”,
theme_advanced_buttons3 : “”,
theme_advanced_toolbar_location : “top”,
theme_advanced_toolbar_align : “left”,
theme_advanced_statusbar_location : “bottom”,
theme_advanced_resizing : true,
theme_advanced_resize_horizontal : false,
content_css : “/Styles/blaqStyleSheet.css”,
body_class : “contentBody”

})</script>