Programming in the State of 70% Drunkeness

Got WYSIWYG?

If you know what WYSIWYG, you probably know about TinyMCE, one of the most popular WYSIWYG out there developed by Moxie Code

This build is purely a performance based. As stated in their description:

From a pure feature point of view, this release might not be very impressive, but if you are interested in JavaScript and do a lot of custom development, this is the release you have been waiting for. One of the main focuses for the new 3.x branch is to produce a more powerful API and also make it output valid XHTML code by default.

With the list of items improved in this release, personally i think it’s a win for everyone who’s implementing TinyMCE, doesn’t matter what the purpose is.

* Rewrote the core and most of the plugins and themes from scratch.
* Reduced the over all script size by 33% and the number of files/requests by 75% so it loads a lot faster.
* Added new and improved serialization engine, faster and more powerful.
* Added new inlinepopups plugin, the dialogs are now skinnable and uses clearlooks2 as default.
* Added new contextmenu plugin, context menus can now have submenus and plugins can add items on the fly.
* Added new skin support for the simple and advanced themes you can alter the whole UI using CSS.
* Added new o2k7 skin for the simple and advanced themes.
* Added new JSON parser/serializer and JSON-RPC class to the core API.
* Added new cookie utility class to the core API.
* Added new Unit testing class to the core API only available in dev mode.
* Added new Safari plugin, fixes lots compatibility of issues with Safari 3.x.
* Added new on demand loading of plugins and themes. Enables you to load and init TinyMCE at any time.
* Added new unit tests in the dev package of TinyMCE. Runs tests on the core API, commands and settings of the editor.
* Removed all button images and replaced them with CSS sprite images. Reduces the number of requests needed.
* Removed lots of language files and merged them into the base language files. Reduces the number of requests needed.
* Removed lots of unnecessary files and merged many of them together to reduce requests and improve loading speed.
* Fixed so convert_fonts_to_spans are enabled by default. So no more font tags.
* Fixed so all classes from @import stylesheets gets imported into the editor.

Another thing that might not be recognized yet is the overall fixes for Safari 3. If you have been using the older version of TinyMCE, try it out on Safari 3 and almost nothing works there.

Also, the popup windows are replaced with floating popups within the page to prevent the popup blocker from breaking the user experience.

Full Article can be found here http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/punbb/viewtopic.php?id=8959

Full Featured demo: http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/example_skin.php?example=true

A few thoughts of mine:

1. By looking at the demo, it feels like it is even slower now when the WYSIWYG gets initialized.

2. As usual, there are way too many features packed into it and getting rid of them can be a pain (maybe i’m wrong since it’s a new release)

3. “Added new on demand loading of plugins and themes. Enables you to load and init TinyMCE at any time.” This is definitely a plu. I can’t remember how many hours i’ve put in to allow more than one session of TinyMCE to be initiated within the same page (through Ajax).

It is really cool to see the guys over at Moxie Codes are working so hard to keep this awesome WYSIWYG alive. And yes, it’s about time for it to get a major core improvement Thanks TinyMCE team.

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