We are taking CKEditor 5 Collaboration Features to the Future of Education Technology Conference in Miami on January 14-17, 2020. But before we meet there, we would like to talk about what makes a WYSIWYG rich text editor so important for learning management systems and education applications. If you are an education software creator, school’s in-house technology person, or a concerned educator who is not happy with the current writing experience in your education software, read on!

In the newest version of CKEditor 4 we introduced a new mechanism of handling pasting into the WYSIWYG editor that is provided by the Paste Tools plugin. It is based on a battle-tested idea of middlewares and simplifies the process of adding new paste handlers. We have decided to play around a little bit more with this concept and created a simple library for handling pasting and dropping content into a web page. Read on for more!

It has been a while since we updated you about how we are doing on the collaboration front. Today, we are happy to announce that all three of CKEditor 5 collaboration features - comments, track changes, and real-time collaborative editing are now in perfect harmony. You can edit, use key features like tables, paste from Word and Google Docs, comment or suggest changes on the document with collaborators. All in real-time.

When you are creating a complex system from scratch, you have hundreds of problems to solve and the amount of data you send over the network is usually not the first one to be tackled. It was no different in CKEditor 5.

We are happy to announce the release of the native integration of CKEditor 5 with Vue.js, the progressive JavaScript framework. This brings the number of available CKEditor 5 rich-text editor integrations with popular frameworks to three, after the Angular 2+ and React integrations published a few weeks ago.

We are happy to announce the first two integrations of CKEditor 5 with popular JavaScript frameworks: React and Angular 2+. We want to make installing and integrating CKEditor 5 as simple and intuitive as possible.

In this article I give a quick overview of the problem we aim to solve, the solutions we developed for that purpose and how to approach collaborative editing in your application.

The heart of the new CKEditor Ecosystem is undoubtedly our brand new editor, CKEditor 5. It’s not simply the next major version of one the most popular rich text editors out there. It’s the next chapter on what web text editors are, how they should be used and what possibilities they bring.

To answer why we’ve made a choice to keep CKEditor 5 code in multiple repositories I should perhaps first explain what problems that brings. Or rather — what are the advantages of keeping things in a single repository.

’It all started in 2003. The decision of bringing my pet project into the open — to an environment I was still unfamiliar with. In a period when Open Source Software wasn’t yet a fashionable thing to do in order to show that you’re cool.’

’What features should a rich text editor have? Should bold produce the ’strong’ or the ’b’ HTML tag? Should underline be included? What about formatting features like font size or color?

’Last year I’ve introduced some details about CKEditor 5, our new content editing platform, which will reach the market in 2016. Since then, we’ve made very good progress with its development. We’re almost finalizing the code for the basic infrastructure that will support the editor’s core.
There is one aspect though that has not been emphasized enough so far  -  the fact that (since the very beginning) we have been designing CKEditor 5 in the open, so anyone can jump in to help us or to simply share their opinion.’

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.

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 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.

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.

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!