Talking Drupal #438 - CKEditor 4 End of Life

February 19, 2024
Today we are talking about CKEditor 4 End of Life, Moving to CKEditor 5, and what you can expect from CKEditor 5 now and in the future with guest Wim Leers. We’ll also cover CKEditor 5 Premium Features as our module of the week.

Listen:

direct Link

Topics

  • CKEditor 4 end of life June 2023
  • Issues people might see if they are still on CKE4
  • Why a third party library and not roll our own
  • Are there other alternatives
  • Why did Drupal decide on CKEditor
  • Drupal 10 moved to CKE5 How should people update
  • Upgrade gotchas
  • What's new in CKE5
  • What is on the roadmap regarding Drupal and CKE5
  • Is there going to be a CKE6
  • Native Web Components
  • Does CKE in core affect Gutenberg

 

Resources

 

Module of the Week

CKEditor 5 Premium Features
  • Brief description:
    • Have you ever wanted to offer your content creators advanced capabilities like real-time collaboration? There’s a module for that.
  • Module name/project name:
  • Brief history
    • How old: created in Sep 2022 by Wiktor Walc, although recent releases are by Wojciech (vOYchekh) Kukowski, both of CKSource, the company behind CKEditor (Wiktor was on episode 372 https://talkingdrupal.com/372)
    • Current version available: 1.2.5 which works with Drupal 9 and 10
  • Maintainership
    • Actively maintained, latest release in the past month
    • User Guide available, link is in the README
    • Number of open issues: 16, 8 of which are bugs
  • Usage stats:
    • 159 sites
  • Module features and usage
    • To me, the most compelling features enabled by this module are the ones that turn your Drupal WYSIWYG into a robust collaboration tool, similar to what users may be used to in tools like Google Docs or Office 365
    • Real-time inline comments and changes from multiple users
    • Track changes to suggest ways the content could be improved
    • A history of changes made in the WYSIWYG, independent of the saved Drupal revisions
    • Tag users with @ mentions to have them notified
    • There’s also a Productivity Pack to enhance your WYSIWYG, and again some of these will be familiar to users that also use popular online collaboration tools
    • A document outline that uses heading within your content to make navigation for moving quickly within the document
    • Can generate a linked Table of Contents, which will automatically update as headings are added or changed
    • Slash commands to execute actions
    • Enhanced Paste from Office, to preserve complex incoming content structures, but with clean HTML as the result
    • And more!
    • Another premium feature is the ability to export to Word or PDF, and it can also restore full screen editing, a feature that didn’t make the transition from CKEditor 4 to 5, as part of the open source offering
    • Finally, it also includes an AI Assistant that provides yet another interesting way to empower your content authors to leverage AI tools for their writing, including the ability to change the style, length, or tone of selected content using pre-made prompts, or generate content with custom queries. It also works with a number of different models out of the box, so you’re not restricted to ChatGPT
    • The module is open source but using these premium features does require a subscription. The pricing will depend on the number of active users and which features you need, so if you’d like more information you can use the contact form at ckeditor.com
    • Also worth mentioning here that the team at Palantir has released a YouTube video of an open source collaborative editor that they’re calling Edit Together. It’s based on the ProseMirror rich-text editor framework, and the blog where they announced it mentioned a mid-2024 release, but that was back in Jul 2023 and I haven’t been able to find any updates since then