CKEditor Weekly for April 9, 2015

We're back with another CKEditor Weekly! After a short Easter break, we are back to working on the CKEditor 4.5 and CKFinder 3 beta. There’s been quite a significant progress in both projects over the last few days, so read on for details!

CKEditor in Review

• We finished block widgets' drag and drop integration with the clipboard APIs. Block widgets' drag and drop functionality is based on the Line Utilities plugin features and it does not have anything in common with the native drag and drop (well, except the idea). Despite this, we made sure that the same events (dragstart, drop, dragend and paste) are fired on the editor, so all kinds of drag and drop work consistently.

• The above allowed the team to close multiple other tickets - #12090, #12095, #11219, and as a result we finally closed the umbrella ticket for the entire drag and drop and files pasting support.

• The new sample and toolbar configurators now use the samples framework which we built to unify the look of CKEditor related projects' documentation and samples.

• We closed the first ticket regarding support for the new Microsoft browser named Spartan. However, Microsoft has not clarified yet what the future of Internet Explorer is (which will likely coexist with Spartan). Moreover, Windows 10 Technical Preview and the included Spartan browser are very unstable, which makes testing a nightmare and also, the lack of clarity undermines the sense of work that we have done. Therefore, we are considering reverting it and waiting until Microsoft fixes Windows 10 and Spartan and sheds some light on their future plans.

• The work on the Media Embed plugin was merged to the major branch. This is going to be an extremely useful plugin and we are considering adding it to the official presets at some point.

• Some stats:

  • We reached 100 tickets in the 4.5.0 milestone! It’s not a record, though.

  • The diff between 4.4.x and 4.5.0 is huuuge: 328 files changed, 24848 insertions(+), 4048 deletions(-).

• What's now? Literally two tickets related to code are still opened and we expect to close them tomorrow. This means that we are going to start the testing phase very soon. CKEditor 4.5.0 beta is coming!

Other Projects

CKFinder 3 beta work is progressing nicely and the internal testing phase of CKFinder is in progress, including preliminary tests on Spartan. See the list of some of the improvements from the last few days:

• The Moono skin received its own icon set compatible with CKEditor and huge progress has been made in the Moono skin itself. The skin system in CKFinder was refactored to allow providing custom skins for CKFinder in an easy way and to allow overriding specific stylesheets. Also as a result the amount of loaded CSS files was reduced.

• Right To Left mode was made usable, so that it was possible to start providing translations while the work on RTL support will still continue for some time.

• The positioning of dialog windows was improved, allowing to position dialog windows at the top of the application instead of being positioned in the middle, for dialog windows need space to expand.

• The file icons (displayed when no thumbnail is available) are now fully configurable.

• The support for mobile devices in the Crop image tool was fixed.

• Significant improvements to the UX of Rename File dialog window were made.

• The folders pane was fixed to allow scrolling/swiping folders.

• The events/requests names were cleaned up to make the public API cohesive.

• The sample plugins code was cleaned up. The work on the public documentation (that is not publicly available yet) progressed: a tutorial about creating plugins was created.

Around the Net

• A new HTML 5 Validation plugin was added to the Add-ons Repository.

That's it for this week. If you would like to be featured in one of our CKEditor Weeklies, or have an interesting tidbit that relates to CKEditor, leave a comment below or contact us!