CKEditor 5 brings a wealth of new features, improvements and fixes. It also adds new drag and drop functionality covering textual content, widgets and HTML or plain text dropping from outside the editor.
CKEditor 5 is a powerful framework that can be used to create a wide range of WYSIWYG editing solutions. Whether you are creating an online docs app or a Twitter-like chat tool, you can be sure that CKEditor 5 will offer the perfect platform.
Features
CKEditor 5 offers numerous features to enhance the editing experience. It includes collaborative editing support, content looks and structure, file formats management, multi-language support and more.
Creating documents with CKEditor 5 is fast and intuitive. The editor automatically detects text changes, allowing users to apply a variety of formatting and styling options. It also supports a number of inline codes that can be used to apply essential alterations like bold, italic, strikethrough, underline, and subscript without using the toolbar.
The editor has a built-in style manager that provides a set of predefined styles to help improve the document’s look and feel. In addition, it also allows developers to add their own custom styles.
Other important features of CKEditor 5 include auto-formatting, inline code and image support, and block quotes. These features enable you to easily edit content and attract attention by adding special blocks of text.
Another important feature is the ability to control the size and placement of images with a contextual toolbar on mouse click. Moreover, CKEditor 5 offers image captions and image styles to help make images visually appealing.
In addition, CKEditor 5 comes with various upload and storage systems that allow for easier media handling. Moreover, it is compatible with most popular CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap, Foundation, Materialize or Semantic-UI.
CKEditor 5 is in active development and new features are being added all the time. If you have any ideas or feedback, please share them with us. You can do so by sending a message to the CKEditor mailing list or by participating in a discussion on Drupal Slack.
Documentation
CKEditor 5 is a modern, ES6 rich-text editor with MVC architecture and a custom data model. It offers a wide range of features including collaborative editing, comments, track changes, image and video support and a whole lot more.
Despite the fact that CKEditor 5 is a very flexible and universal platform, it does come with some limitations. For instance, some of its features such as media embeds or PDF and Word exports require specific add-ons that can be purchased separately.
Another drawback of CKEditor 5 is that it does not have a very good set of documentation, especially for advanced users. Fortunately, there is an excellent help center with FAQs and quick support via email and phone.
You can find more information about CKEditor 5 in its official website or on the GitHub repository. There you will also find a lot of useful tutorials, guides and sample projects.
Unlike some other similar projects, CKEditor 5 is an Open Source project and you are very welcome to contribute to it. You can even translate the project into your own language if you want to!
The CKEditor 5 Framework is a set of components that enable you to easily create any type of rich text editing solution. It consists of different, easy-to-integrate editors, plugins and user-made features that allow you to build a customized solution tailored to your specific needs.
Moreover, CKEditor 5 provides predefined “builds” that provide convenient solutions for various editing use cases. These predefined editor solutions differ from one another in UI and UX, but they all offer a set of basic features that are sufficient to start using the CKEditor 5 Framework and the CKEditor 5 plugins.
Plugins
CKEditor 5 features a flexible API and supports a wide variety of plugins. These can be integrated with the framework to create your own custom editor.
Developing plugins for ckeditor5 is a challenging task because it is not just about creating a new module that integrates with CKEditor, but it requires a deep understanding of CKEditor and Drupal’s data model. This is due to the fact that CKEditor 5 stores blobs of HTML that need to be processed, rendered, and understood differently from the way that Drupal does.
One of the most important things to understand is that ckeditor5 is built with a virtual DOM which requires an abstract syntax tree in memory. This can be a little confusing for developers that are used to editing directly with the editor.
However, CKEditor 5 has a very extensive documentation that makes it easier to understand how to use it. This is one of the main advantages that CKEditor 5 has over its predecessor.
There are two main ways to add plugins to ckeditor5: using the editor builder or passing a plugin through the static builtinPlugins property of an editor class. The difference between these methods is that adding a plugin through the static builtinPlugins method lets you enable it automatically in all editor instances created by this editor class, while passing a plugin to the editor builder method affects only one editor instance.
To get started with building a plugin for CKEditor5, first create a remote upstream repo pointing to the official ckeditor5 framework and then branch it and merge either the stable or master branches. This will allow you to keep up with changes and resolve any issues that arise during development.
Online builder
The CKEditor 5 online builder is an application that allows you to design and download custom ckeditor5 builds. It offers a simple and intuitive UI that makes it easy to select your desired editor type, toolbar and set of plugins in a few steps.
Start by logging in and selecting your preferred editor type. You can choose from several different editors, including classic, balloon and document. Each one comes with different features, which you can learn more about in the documentation.
You can also choose the editor layout and add buttons representing your chosen plugins. Using the drag-and-drop interface, you can create a multiline toolbar layout as well.
After choosing your preferred editor type and toolbar, press the Next step button on top to continue. This will open a new window where you can select your plugins and click on the Next button.
Depending on the editor type, you can choose from several built-in and third-party plugins. These can range from small add-ons to full-featured plugins that provide extra functionality.
Some of them are premium add-ons that require an additional license to use. These are marked with an appropriate badge on the plugin page.
Another interesting feature is the ability to export your document in various file formats, including PDFs and Word documents. These files can be printed or downloaded later on.
Finally, CKEditor 5 can save your content in HTML by default. However, it can also output Markdown, as long as you have a dedicated Markdown plugin installed.
The CKEditor 5 online builder was developed to help developers implement a custom build of the editor in their projects. There are two unique paths to do so, an easy and beginner-friendly path with the online builder or an advanced path that includes using npm and webpack.
DLL build
CKeditor5 uses a DLL builder to allow developers to easily add new plugins to an editor without having to recompile the build itself. This can be especially useful if you want to add a new feature that does not require rebuilding the entire editor.
DLL builds also make it easy to customize the user interface and functionality. For example, a custom icon can be added to the editor’s toolbar and a DLL build will generate a compatible JavaScript file that is used by the plugin when it is loaded.
A DLL build will also produce translation files for several core packages, making it easy to create a localized version of the editor. These translations can be imported into the CKEditor 5 online builder or directly into the editor using a predefined build.
One of the most useful DLL builds is the base DLL build for CKEditor 5. This single file includes all necessary files from several core CKEditor 5 packages that are used by almost every editor installation: utils, core, engine, ui, clipboard, enter, paragraph, select-all, typing, undo, upload, and widget.
The base DLL build is available on NPM in the ckeditor5-base package. You can also find a DLL-compatible package build for a specific feature by adding ckeditor5-[FEATURE_NAME] to your project’s npm package.
To use a DLL build, add the ckeditor5-dll-build webpack plugin to your project and then follow the DLL build tutorial. Once the project is built, you can publish it to NPM. This will automatically install the base DLL build and any DLL-compatible package build that you include into your project. You can also test the build by running npm run dll-build in your project’s js/build directory.
