CKEditor Weekly for May 18, 2015

Here we go with the latest issue of CKEditor Weekly! Past week was all about fixing issues in our latest beta releases - CKEditor 4.5 and CKFinder 3. We also had the pleasure to play around with a different take on CKEditor's UI - AlloyEditor. Read on for more!

CKEditor in Review

• Work on CKEditor 4.5 continues. Last week we hit some bigger issues, nevertheless, every single day we are closer to the final release. Some work has also been done on CKEditor 4.4.8. It will be released together with CKEditor 4.5 as the last bug-fixing release in the 4.4.* branch.
• Additionally, we had a huge pleasure to play around with AlloyEditor. This is a completely different take on CKEditor UI. AlloyEditor uses CKEditor as an editing framework, but the UI was replaced with a set of completely new React-based plugins. It is a great example that architecture implemented in CKEditor can be reused to achieve diverse results. Modularity and reusability is the right direction for CKEditor and we have been focused on reinforcing these aspects for the last few years. For instance, end-user features introduced by CKEditor 4.5 (like support for uploading dropped files or the media embedding module) are based on lower-level tools which can be used by developers to build their custom plugins with different UI or behavior. These are also the most important requirements for CKEditor 5, which is now being designed from scratch to push the idea of the "editing framework" even further.
• The CKEditor website has also undergone significant changes. The Add-ons Repository search tool was completely rewritten

Other Projects

CKFinder 3

Here is a list of CKFinder 3 related actions from the last week:

• The integration with CKEditor was fixed and enhanced - it now allows for passing CKFinder configuration options and specifying target folder for file uploads.
• Displaying modal dialog windows on mobile devices was fixed.
• Further updates were added to the documentation.
• Some important accessibility issues were discussed and the results are as follows: 
  • We started working on intuitive keyboard navigation support, with plenty of improvements scheduled for 3.0
  • We agreed the way in which focused items should be displayed and scheduled it for 3.0 as well.
• A few styling issues were fixed, including missing borders and scrollbar appearing in inappropriate places.
• We fixed the version of the layout of CKFinder with a completely removed toolbar.
• The landing page for CKFinder 3.0 preview was developed and is almost ready to go live, with several working samples included!
• Internal CKFinder tests were significantly improved and we are now able to test different integration methods and release versions.

Around the Net

• The ckeditor_rails gem was updated to version 4.4.7. This gem integrates CKEditor with Rails asset pipeline for ease of use.
• AlloyEditor - a modern WYSIWYG editor built on top of CKEditor with a totally new UI based on React was released.
• Bootstrap Visibility Plugin - plugin for CKEditor which extends several dialog windows adding a "Responsive Visibility" tab that allows you to control if various elements should be displayed on different screen sizes.
• Dropdown menu manager - this plugin adds the feature to describe with the help of the CKEditor's configuration various dropdowns and populate them with desirable items.
• Drag and Drop Image Uploads - a simple, cross-platform (and free!) plugin for allowing Drag and Drop image uploading. 

That sums up the last 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. 

Have a great week ahead!