FCKEditor: Lose the textareas

As a Web developer, you will inevitably be storing HTML content in a database field at some point in your career. If you find yourself occasionally setting up a CLOB, BLOB, memo, or text data type in your DBMS of choice, you’ll be interested in FCKEditor. If you grit your teeth every time your users ask why they can’t put line breaks to their content by pressing the ENTER key, you’ll definitely be interested in it.

FCKEditor is an open source WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) XHTML editor that runs in a multitude of Web browsers—Internet Explorer 5.5+, Firefox 1.0+, Mozilla 1.3+ and Netscape 7+ . The main developers of FCKEditor have recently raised money to help them start developing a release that will run in Safari, so we should expect that capability in the near future.

Most importantly, this editor creates the illusion to users that they are using Microsoft Word right within your Web application. You don’t need to teach users how to write <strong> and <em> tags in order for them to bold and italicize text. No need to teach them the <br /> tag, let alone trying to explain the purpose of the space and slash at the end of the tag. If you choose to configure it as such, FCKEditor will even let users insert pictures and tables into their content as well.

The Good

The editor is very feature-rich. It leverages a spell checker, file browser, file uploader, and more, all for free. I’ve purchased similar solutions in the past (ActivEdit[1] comes to mind) that cost $100+ per site license (encrypted source!) that do not offer as many features, nor as much stability.

Out of the box, FCKEditor is ready to be easily deployed on servers running ColdFusion, PHP, ASP.NET, Java, and Perl, as well as a JavaScript-invoked engine for those without a server side application engine running.

Because FCKEditor is open source, any gearhead can go into the source code and manipulate it however they please. There are also many customizable features like skinning, creating feature templates, and creating CSS style definitions.

FCKEditor also generates valid XHTML, which many other WYSIWYG editors fail to do.

So far, I’ve leveraged this tool in PHP and ColdFusion MX with few headaches.

The Not So Good

Like most open source projects, documentation for FCKEditor is limited to a poorly-written wiki and forums filled with some very confused people. If you want customization outside of what the product offers out of the box, you’ll need to do some digging. It took me a couple nights to figure out how to change the available feature set to the “Basic” set without going and editing a mess of JavaScript files. I’d recommend digging around in the example files to see how to leverage the different features available.

Of course, it is worth mentioned that FCKEditor is not intended to be used on: public applications that get served to users on the Internet. It’s great for password-protected administrative applications and Intranets. But you can’t go tell the Internet (the world) to only use Firefox or newer versions of Internet Explorer on your Web application. It is much easier to tell that to a handful of people who will be using the news editor to update press releases on the Web site though.

One downside of the built-in spell checker is that it requires the user to download a plug-in. Bummer.

Lastly, a tool like this can only be as good as the client it runs on. There is still no guarantee that the user will be running one of the browsers required. And if the user has JavaScript turned off, there is no hope.

Since I’ve mentioned the client side, I would love to see a Flash-based WYSIWYG editor. CF_PIM has a first attempt at a ColdFusion MX 7-generated Flash form[1] rich text editor, but it is lacking in a lot of features and is very kludgy when it comes to using the features that are present. Still kind of cool either way.

[1]: This page does exist anymore, so I am linking to the Wayback Machine archive.