Meet TinyMCE, the new Text Editor for Freestyler

Although most end users won't notice the difference, Datalink are pleased to announce that we have rolled out a new text editor for Freestyler and many of our other popular software.  This enables a wider range of supported browsers and will make life a bit easier for many early adopters of Internet Explorer 7.

We went through a lengthy process evaluating a range of text editors which are widely used with content management systems.  Some of them support integration and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing, fewer still suport a wide range of browsers and their licencing methods range in flexibility.

This is an area where we don't feel compelled to "reinvent the wheel", and we have supported integrated editors since Freestyler's early days for Freestyler's rich text formatting.

In the past we have modified these systems to suit the functions of the system, for usability reasons and to comply with our philosophy of separation of design from content to instill consistency and familiarity in sites.  For example, we would typically remove many buttons to make it simple for novice users.  We would typically remove the ability to underline for usability reasons to avoid confusion with hypertext links and removed the ability to change text colour to maintain consistency with corporate styles. 

However some of the earlier editors in stopped supporting some of the latest browsers.

So we looked at FCKeditor, TinyMCE and htmlArea as possible solutions.

In the end, we chose TinyMCE, which we have finally integrated with the CMS as the default solution.  The only downside of TinyMCE is that there is currently no support for Mac Safari (unfortunately you can't always please everyone), however we believe that this will become available in future releases.

We have planned for the future to build an abstraction layer to enable other editors to be substituted if required, and we have implemented FCKeditor on at least one site for specific requirements.

We are working towards enabling inline embedded video in a subsequent release.

The new editor is built-into Freestyler 5.1, which is Datalink's newest version of the Freestyler CMS.