MooEditable

Tuesday, 16 November 2010 11:54

Recently, I was looking at Joomla and its pretty huge size. I saw several areas where Joomla could use some improvement in terms of size. For example replacing the SimplePie library with FeedParser, or removing the Blueprint CSS framework. There is also a lot that could be gained by optimizing the general code of Joomla, which I will show in future postings.

One of the easiest fixes however would be to replace the huge TinyMCE editor with something more lightweight. I stumbled upon the Mootools based editor MooEditable, which, as far as I can see, does everything that I would require from a WYSIWYG editor in Joomla. So I took a stab at it and created a plugin out of it.

This new plugin can be installed in Joomla 1.6 and can work as a replacement to TinyMCE. Instead of over 1.5 MB, it weighs in at a little bit under 100kb when installed and in use and in my feeling, working with it is a lot faster than with TinyMCE. In contrast to TinyMCE, its also not half a gazillion files, but only a good dozen files, which would be very beneficial (when this editor would be adopted by the Joomla project as the default editor) for people that need to upload the Joomla package by FTP.

If you want to install it, first download the package here, then install it in your Joomla 1.6. Now you need to go into the Plugin Manager, enable and edit this plugin, setting the settings to something reasonable. After that, switch the editor in the global configuration of your site.

Where there is light, there are shadows:

This editor requires Mootools 1.3, but the Joomla project so far has not upgraded from 1.2.4 to 1.3 in the Joomla 1.6 development cycle. At this moment, I build my own Mootools 1.3 and overwrote the original file. If the Joomla project does not provide the upgrade to Mootools 1.3 before 1.6 is released as stable, I'm going to provide a Mootools 1.3 upgrade plugin.

The other issue is, that the author of MooEditable told me, that there are browser incompatibilities with MooEditable. I don't know which problems these are specifically, but apparently there are some. So is this really a good replacement for TinyMCE? I hope that it will become one in the future.

Credits: I wanna thank the authors of MooEditable, Lim Chee Aun, Radovan Lozej, Ryan Mitchell, Olivier Refalo and T.J. Leahy. This editor is really great work. :-)