We are using CKEditor as our editor of choice for composing the bodies of emails in an Email Marketing app we developed and launched a few months ago. For this first release of the app, we took the simple approach, and have a single textarea field with class="ckeditor" and an id of "EmailBody". It works very nicely, and all of our code is built around loading email templates into that textarea, letting the user edit the templates for their particular campaigns, and then saving their campaigns in a database. We are using ajax calls extensively, and pass the edited email body content and all the other campaign details they've entered, by serializing and sending those details plus the email content in a single POST call.
We now have a need in version 2 of this app to lock down certain areas in the content for readonly, and allow updates only to specific sections of the email body. CKEditor's inline editing is exactly what we need, but rather than go back and re-work that single textarea design into a div-based design, I'm wondering if there is a way to combine both approaches, so the template would still be loaded into the textarea element, and read from that, to pass to the database, but portions of the template loaded into the textarea would allow inline editing using contenteditable="true".
Is there a way to use both of those approaches together? I know I could convert the textarea element to a parent div, but as I said, I would have to make adjustments in many other spots to properly handle the content in the div vs. the textarea.
Thanks for any help.