There are a lot of questions we're asked quite frequently about SilverStripe, so we thought it might be a good idea to start addressing some of these through blog posts. First up, this tweet prompted us to talk about why we use TinyMCE as the WYSIWYG component of our CMS.
Sam Minnée, SilverStripe Ltd’s CTO, has the answer for this one.
There are many WYSIWYG editors available and TinyMCE isn't everyone's favourite. So why did we choose it in 2005 and why are we still using it in 2011? Why are we using it?
- TinyMCE enjoyed market leadership in terms of open source editors when we first built the SilverStripe CMS back in 2005, so that’s why we have it to begin with.
- Its license is compatible with SilverStripe's.
- It has a wide set of features and plugins, that are often enabled on specific installations.
- It has an active development team.
- Our image & link inserters are custom-built for TinyMCE, so changing is non-trivial.
We recently looked for a suitable replacement for TinyMCE, to increase its speed and make it easier to customise. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a suitable replacement, so we're sticking with TinyMCE. However, the version of TinyMCE bundled with SilverStripe 2.4.4 is getting old and upgrading to the latest version of TinyMCE is on the roadmap for the next major release.
Another feature that we are hoping to add to SilverStripe CMS 3.0 is the ability to support different editing styles, such as Markdown, raw HTML editing, and/or alternative WYSIWYG editors.
If you know of a full featured, licence compatible, and actively maintained WYSIWYG editor that you think could be a replacement for TinyMCE, feel free to kick off a discussion at http://groups.google.com/group/silverstripe-dev.
Thanks,
Sam
As I mentioned, we’d like to regularly address readers’ questions about SilverStripe (specifically, any of the thinking behind it, as opposed to things that would be better asked on the forums), so please feel free to leave yours in the comments section.
