Development:Moodle-specific customisations to the HTML editor
In this forum thread I summarise the position we have got ourselves into with the HTML editor. Moodle uses a WYSYG HTML editor called HTML area, which is now discontinued. We really want to switch to one of three other choices, but before we can do so, we need to work out exactly which Moodle-specific customisations we have made to HTML area to integrate it with Moodle, so we can make the same customisations to whichever editor we adopt in its place.--Tim Hunt 12:57, 29 July 2007 (CDT)
Summarly of the customisations we already know about
- Integrate the add image dialog with the Moodle course files area.
- Accessibility changes in Moodle 1.8
Three possible replacements
All three of these are widely used by other open source projects, are under active development, with a release since May 2007.
Of these, only TinyMCE currently claims to support Safari, although FCK is aiming at it, and give a good justification why it is not there yet: http://dev.fckeditor.net/wiki/Compatibility
TinyMCE
LGPL licensed
Xinha
When HTMLarea was discontinued, this project was set up to continue development. Approximately BSD licenced.
FCKeditor
GPL, LGPL or MPL tri-licence. I once talked to some people who had successfully got FCK editor working with moodle.
Detailed analysis of Moodle-specific changes from the CVS logs
Unmodified files
These were checked in to their current location (lib/editor/htmlarea) on 3rd April 2006 with the comment "Moving old editor to htmlarea folder." by Janne Mikkonen, who is the default assignee of editor bugs in the tracker.
I don't yet know where these files lived before the move, so I can't look further back in history than this yet.
- images/* (except for images/kbhelp.gif).
- lang/en.js
images/kbhelp.gif
Added 30th November 2006 by Vy-Shane Sin Fat with comment "New help button for keyboard shortcuts." - part of the Moodle 1.8 accessibility work.
lang/en.php
This is a Moodle-specific file to make HTML area use Moodle's internationalisation system, instead of the one built into HTMLarea.