You often consider writing a new piece of software when the products already available on the market seem insufficient in terms of their functionalities, or simply do not fit the goals of your company. It’s obvious that you wouldn’t want to use a random out-of-the-box solution that doesn’t exactly do what you intended it to do. However, when you consider these few points before you decide to create a completely new content editing solution, it becomes clear that reinventing the wheel is the last thing in which your company should be involved.

CKEditor has made a long way in more than 12 years of its existence. During this time, it has been greatly improved in many aspects, becoming a rock-solid solution for web applications, reaching 15 million downloads recently.
The Web itself changed during these years. New standards emerged together with new ways of consuming and sharing information. A much stronger understanding about the value of web content has developed, for the benefit of the present and the future of the world. JavaScript finally showed its power in the everyday life of people and the web technology evolved to become the mandatory option for modern software.

Open Source Software came a long way from being created and maintained by passionate developers looking for game-changing solutions, to becoming the backbone of the tech industry. Past few years saw the rise of investment in open source solutions by such tech moguls as IBM, Intel, Facebook, and Google - to name just a few.

Every once in a while some developer notices that there’s still no perfect WYSIWYG editor for the web on the market and then this happens:

In our past blog post entitled “Intro to Customizing CKEditor 4” we have written about the basics of customizing your CKEditor version using the predefined download packages, CKBuilder and the Add-Ons Repository.

The combination of a massive growth in the consumption of online content and the introduction of new digital channels and devices has resulted in a dramatically different landscape for editorial staff. Maintaining a consistent brand experience across all channels has become a significant challenge. This includes the appearance and impact for formatted text.

David Carralon is a marketing professional based in Paris. He currently works as the Head of International SEO for Career Builder. In his spare time he writes about Search Engine Marketing on his blog and tweets about “all things digital marketing” at @DavidCarralon.

We are happy to announce the most awaited release of CKEditor 4.5, the next major editor version that introduces an entire spectrum of amazing new features and improvements and is the biggest release since CKEditor 4.0. The CKEditor team has been working on this ground-breaking release for the last year, polishing the beta version as much as we could during the last couple of weeks, and we are extremely proud to be able to finally deliver the final version to the general public!

We have tried several other solutions, but in the end we were not satisfied at all. We have been searching for a tool that offers all requested functionalities and which is highly customizable. Then we found CKSource with their product - CKEditor. We have discovered very quickly, that CKEditor is the perfect tool for us.

This week we crossed an amazing milestone reaching 15 million downloads of CKEditor historically (check the website footer). In 2014 alone we had 3 million downloads! Impressive!

The first thing you usually want to achieve when creating online content is to reach the maximum possible audience. Most ways of increasing your reach are usually connected to digital marketing campaigns and online advertising, however you have to be sure that your content was created accessible from the get-go.

The power of each Open Source project lies in the community around it. To make community contributions and support easier, we have decided to migrate from our own forum that had a limited number of features to a full-blown community support platform - Stack Overflow. Read on for more details about the move!

If not entangled in a love-hate relationship, WYSIWYG editors are usually taken for granted by the online community. Most users think sites and CMSs naturally come with such tools, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Unless a site uses a CMS like Drupal 8 that includes CKEditor by default, developers and site owners have to manually implement them.

Picking a WYSIWYG editor for your project can be a daunting task. Choices abound with a few major players like CKEditor dominating the market. HTML editors can give your website an additional layer of usability, but adding third-party components to any online project should be done with great care. The Web is ever-evolving, which means your site must also be in step with the times or risk opening itself up to unforeseen problems.

As the creators of a highly popular WYSIWYG rich text editor, CKSource is no stranger to proper web standards. CKEditor is responsible for producing a good part of the HTML content online so it must always generate semantic markup. Web standards are what keep the Internet from chaos and accessibility plays an important role in defining how the web is shaped. CKSource is proud of being fully committed to the cause – a decision that has brought the company unexpected benefits.

Client was looking for quality support on a commercial level, something they feared they wouldn’t find in an Open Source project. They also needed support for IE8 and above on Windows 7 64 bit.

We are proud to present the new and shiny CKEditor Examples that has just been published online and is also available for download. The CKEditor Examples is a huge collection of resources designed to help you get familiar with all editor features and make the process of implementing, configuring and integrating CKEditor with your website or application easier. And what’s the best part? It’s free!

Last week the CKSource team met for two days in Warsaw, Poland, to talk about various topics ranging from future CKEditor functionalities, CKFinder 3.0, Bender.js, and many other current and future projects. The meetup concluded with an office party and a night on the town! In all, it was loads of fun with some interesting company decisions being made in the process.

We’d like to inform all FCKeditor users that we have just released FCKeditor 2.6.11. CKEditor’s granddaddy occasionally comes out of retirement for important security fixes, and in this case version 2.6.11 fixes a vulnerability reported by Robin Bailey (Dionach). We strongly urge anyone still using FCKeditor to please upgrade, preferably to the latest CKEditor!

On April 1st we posted an article about CKEditor closing its source code. This was obviously an April Fools joke, or more precisely an opportunity to use satire to remind the community of our Open Source position. CKEditor is not going commercial and has no intention of ever doing so. CKSource is also not cooperating with any government agency!

Since version 4.3.3 CKEditor supports two popular package managers, Bower and Composer. They can be used to install CKEditor releases and keep them up to date in the same way that you maintain other dependencies of your project.

Bug submissions are one of the most misinterpreted and misused requests in any Open Source community. They’re often falsely reported, but left unanswered they put a blemish on any given project. This forces developers to spend time clarifying how such reports aren’t really bugs – time which could be better spent elsewhere.

CKEditor 4.1 is just around the corner, so it is a final call for all plugin developers to update their code in order to comply with content filtering that the new editor version introduces. CKEditor 4.1 Release Candidate was released on March 6, 2013, and the final release is coming very soon.

It’s official! CKEditor is 10 years old! Exactly a decade ago I endeavored on a JavaScript project for Internet Explorer 6 (WAT!) bearing my initials (I was young and crazy). The result was an Open Source WYSIWYG editor called FCKeditor, later CKEditor (find the easter egg on our home page!). Time sure flew by… Today we are celebrating the editor’s 10th anniversary!