Upgrading HTMLArea in MidCOM

Tue 3rd August 2004 20:40 EEST

The HTMLArea is an incredibly fast developing WYSIWYG-editor that runs under Open Source licenses. The ability to convert regular HTML textarea elements into WYSIWYG-editors is an exact answer to most OS CMS' needs - as is the case with MidCOM too.

Originally MidCOM was shipped with the HTMLArea-3.0-alpha, which was sound for most of the tasks but was missing many finer details of WYSIWYG-editing. As a part of my Engineering Thesis I upgraded the HTMLArea in MidCOM to version 3.0-beta, which included significant configuration API changes and several other necessities like TableOperations.

Now with the 3.0-rc1 many changes have occurred and I must say the integration was not as easy as it used to be in 3.0-beta. Especially the changes in the configuration API were particularily annoying - they used to input all common variables like imgURL and popupURL via config object, which they still do, but now they introduced two global variables that I had to set via GET parameters in URL. I'd have preferred using the config object for this too.

Well, what is done is done and after writing this blog entry with the upgraded editor I must say I'm pleased I finally had the time to do it. Some new kick-ass features/updates include:

  • Context menus (just right-click-away to editing blissdom)
  • No more relative URL problems in the IE and enhanced hyperlink dialog (possibility to add title and target -attributes)
  • Cleaner plugin implementation (only one function needed to load all required JS files)
  • Finnish and Swedish localization libraries (thanks to SmallOne for the Swedish translations, my Swedish is simply not good enough)

There's actually a minor bug in the ContextMenus. If you have more than one textarea on your page, the ContextMenu will always open on top of the first textarea. This might be resolved in CVS version of the HTMLArea, so I'll take a look at it later this week.

Anyways, everybody with MidCOM core pre-today, go get yourselves updated - it should be more than worth it!