CKEditor Weekly for July 13, 2015

After a short break caused by recent major CKEditor and CKFinder releases we're back with another CKEditor Weekly! The highlights of July were obviously the three big releases: CKEditor 4.5, CKEditor 4.4.8 with a security patch and CKFinder 3.0 for PHP, but now that these milestones were achieved, we are back on track with pretty exciting stuff! Read on for more.

CKEditor in Review

With quite spectacular CKEditor 4.5 released two weeks ago, the team focused on closing post-release tasks like polishing the documentation and building samples for the new features, some bug fixing as well as improving the usability of the new functionalities.

We published and polished the documentation and samples for the new editor features that were released with CKEditor 4.5:

• Embedding media resources with oEmbed sample and documentation.
• File upload through dialogs and drag&drop sample.
• Drag and drop integration sample.
• Notifications sample.

Attention CKEditor skin authors! A new documentation article explaining how to make your CKEditor skins compatible with version 4.5 has just been published, too! An update is needed to make your skins support new features such as notifications and the "busy" dialog state.

We are also now back to coding! Some of the closed or active tickets:

• Related to character composition (IME) – #13377 and #11663.
• Related to auto embed and media embed features – #13419 and #13410, #13429.
• Fixes for a couple of edge cases in the new custom implementation of drag&drop.
• Fixes for Microsoft Edge (still cumbersome due to browser instability) – #13142 and #13143.
• And more – see the CKEditor Milestone 4.5.2!

CKEditor 5

Finally, part of our attention was shifted to CKEditor 5.

CKEditor 4.5 is probably the last such huge release in the CKEditor 4.x branch. Work on 4.x branch will obviously not terminate as we still have a few important ideas and improvements to implement, but gradually the team will shift more and more resources to the development of CKEditor 5.0, the future of WYSIWYG editing. Having CKEditor 4.5 ready, we're now able to start thinking about our next big challenge for real.

This week the team reopened the discussion about using ECMAScript 6, the recently approved standard. When previously discussed, the new features were rejected because mature tools were still missing. The situation has changed recently with more transpilers and integration tools appearing and every JavaScript developer is looking forward to start coding ES6. However, native support is still limited and unlike in case of some internal, server-side or independent tools, building an editing framework we must take into consideration additional factors like the ease of use, code size and perhaps debugging very complex algorithms on platforms which are not ES6 ready yet.

The discussion is still open as we're conducting extensive research around how building CKEditor for development and production environments could work. Feel free to comment.

Other than that, we are concluding research on the new data model and expect to start producing some documentation and coding it for real in a short period on time. Stay tuned!

Other Projects

The massive release of CKEditor 4.5 was complemented by the equally important milestone achieved on the CKFinder front as the first official and stable release of version 3 for PHP has seen the light of day! While we are humbled by the enthusiastic reactions to this important release, we have already started working on improvements, and thus:

CKFinder 3 for PHP

• Updated the Chinese (China), Croatian and Greek localizations, credit goes to NetRube, Kruno H and Aris - thanks, guys!
• Added documentation for upgrading from CKFinder 2.x to 3.x for configuration options.
• Work on CKFinder 3.1 was started.
• New keyboard shortcuts information dialog (planned for 3.1) was added.
• Drag&Drop on breadcrumbs and folders in compact mode (planned for 3.1) was fixed.

Accessibility Checker

This week we came with a list of Quail, our default accessibility checking engine, changes that we find crucial to extend/maintain Quail. Proposals are placed in the QUAIL Modernization Proposal. If you are interested to see Accessibility Checker live or read how it works, visit the demo page!

We are also happy to report that Accessibility Checker was officially presented at the SamenWerking‬ meeting organised by the Quality Institute of Dutch Municipalities. Our CEO Michal Pik and CKEditor's Benevolent Dictator for Life Frederico Knabben were there to present the Accessibility Checker and came back with plenty of new contacts and ideas!

Team Updates

We are happy to welcome aboard Szymon Kupś, an experienced developer with a real passion for JavaScript and web technologies. Find out more about our new colleague here.

Around the Web

• A new "Accessibility, usability and SEO go hand in hand" article - an interview with David Carralon, the Head of International SEO for Career Builder, was published on CKSource blog and immediately gained some traction in the social media.
• A new case study, which elaborates why AKIOMA chose CKEditor as its WYSIWYG text editor of choice for their offer creation and management software, has been published on the CKSource website.
• The following add-ons have recently been added to our repository:
  • Attachments - helps you attach/upload files to your server.
  • HTML5 Audio - a simple audio player for mp3 and wav files.
• The ckeditor_rails plugin was updated to 4.5.1.
• Yozons has released CKEditor for Vaadin 7.10.0 with support for CKEditor 4.5.1.
• The CKEditor Extended plugin for Elgg was updated to support some changes in Elgg 1.11.
• Django-ckeditor was updated to 4.5.0.
• CKEditor is now available for vTiger CRM textareas.
• phpList launches a new plugin system, CKEditor is one of the six first ones available in the first bundle.
• A new Modules Unraveled podcast discusses the Wysiwyg Fields module for Drupal which lets you use any field type as a CKEditor plugin.

That sums up the exciting last two weeks. 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. 

Have a great week ahead!