Hello Fred, hi all,
Could you give us an idea of your future plans?
-- Will there be a "maintenance" release (2.3)
in a near future
-- or should we expect silent work for major improvements for several months?
Thanks and congratulations again for this great editor!
Eric
Could you give us an idea of your future plans?
-- Will there be a "maintenance" release (2.3)
in a near future
-- or should we expect silent work for major improvements for several months?
Thanks and congratulations again for this great editor!
Eric
RE: Future plans ?
As we have a few months after the last release, you and our community deserve to know the current development status. I hope this message will be clear enough.
The developments have being a little bit slowed down in the first months of this year because of my participation in other projects. Fortunately, version 2.2 is very stable and so this absence didn't bring any drastic impact.
On March I've started working daily in the editor and I've decided to make a drastic step to the project. Until now I have working on the editor stability. Let's now enhance it a little. I've being focused in the following points:
- I've decided to work strongly on browser compatibility issues. My intentions would be to declare next version as compatible with Safari and Opera.
- The work with Opera is going pretty well. Our Opera Advisor, Hallvord Steen, is doing his best to make Opera 9 a good browser for editing. We believe in it and we are working to make it a reality.
- Unfortunately we don't have the same good news in the Safari front. Actually the current Safari is not a good browser for complex applications like FCKeditor (nothing against Safari... just facing the reality). I've tried my best to find incredible workarounds for its bugs, but I'm not intended declaring FCKeditor compatible with it if we can't provide a good as stable editor running on it. It must work at 100%, not less than that. Other editors are saying they are compatible with it, but it is know that their implementations are buggy and incomplete... not a good option for real word production sites and applications. Some of them have already given up their compatibility efforts. I'm actually wasting a lot of time on it, which I could dedicate to make FCKeditor even better over IE, Firefox and Opera. I believe we will have it some day, but there must be interest from the Safari development group to help in this way. I'm ready to help. I ask our community about their "serious" and "realistic" opinion regarding it.
- I'm working on some ways to increase the editor loading performance and some good things are coming from it.
- I'll try to work on a definitive ENTER key handling, if it will not take too long.
- Introducing some new features and bug fixings.
As I'll be introducing many new things, and I'll be also making many changes in the editor core, it will be a sane approach to launch a beta version (probably 2.5 beta). After that, no new features will be added and lots of testing and bug fixing are planned before the final 2.5 release (with possibly a RC in the middle).
There are probably a few things missing in this message, but I just wanted to give you an overview of the current situation.
Frederico Knabben
CKEditor Project Lead and CKSource Owner
--
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RE: Future plans ?
Thank you for the update. It is very useful to know what you are planning for the future of the Editor.
I have one question, are you planing any enhancements to the style drop down, and maybe giving some demo examples of how to apply styles to tables, table cells and table rows. Maybe if this is not easy to do, you can allow us to set the class and style attributes on the table and table cells elements.
Look forward to hearing your opinion.
Thank you for your efforts as usual.
Cheers
Fawzi
RE: Future plans ?
Thank you for these precisions.
We look forward to using the new editor!
Improvements on core points look great and I think they target rightfully the problems of "dummy" users.
A very personal opinion about Safari: We work with many Mac users, that are far from being computer scientists. We did not have any troubles to make them use Firefox instead. None of them had problems switching and are very happy with it.
With the intensive competition arising between Firefox 2 and IE7, I doubt that Apple will have the sufficient will and resources to keep up struggling.
To be pragmatic, I would advise not to complexify the great FCK editor, or even downgrade features because of the limited Safari. A limited edition with basic features for Safari would be enough in my opinion. We know how tough it is to make write cross-browser code!
Maybe should you make the users vote on this topic. Target IE + Firefox for advanced features, and limit Safari to basic ones.
Congratulations again for your editor and leadership,
--Eric
RE: Future plans ?
BUT I disagree some voting here.
RE: Future plans ?
> I doubt that Apple will have the sufficient will and resources to keep up struggling.
What rubbish. Safari is under very active development and is making some really impressive moves forward:
http://webkit.opendarwin.org/blog/
RE: Future plans ?
I'm not going to argue that Safari is progressing, but the HTML editing part seems to be lacking enough capabilities as of today
http://bugzilla.opendarwin.org/buglist. ... alue0-0-0=
That buglist show some problems from my point of view that will need quite some time to be fixed as just fixing one of them will allow the testing of more features, and the combination of new features and more people testing them as the editors add support for Safari will undercover more bugs.
I will like to see at least some basic support for Safari, but I won't like to see the development for the rest of browsers to be slowed down because of that. Just look at Opera, since 8.5 they have focused (among other tasks) on having the WYSIWYG editors working for 9.0 and with the current beta they seem to have fixed their problems and all the editors could be able to easily enable Opera support.