Rich Text Editor For PHP

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A very common question on the UG is one asking for advice and experience on using Rich WYSIWYG Editors in PHP applications, and what members reccommend.

While this is not a question that has a definitive answer, there are several editors available that have proved to be very stable and popular with community developers for various reasons, in varying situations.

This is to be treated simply as a list of solutions that PHPUG members have successfully implemented in projects and can reccommend based on past discussion. "Which one is the best?" is an arguable question, and often it will depend on the target application.

Contents

Open Source Solutions

If you add a new entry to the list, please add it in alphabetical order.

FCKEditor

Perhaps the most popular RTE for its feature set, FCKEditor is often used in situations that require as much HTML control as possible and can be found in several large scale projects including Adobe ColdFusion, Oracle Application Express and MailChimp.

Amoung simple tasks that FCKEditor has in common with others on this list, it also supports File Upload and Spell Checking out of the box (where as others require a plugin). And as of the time of writing, FCKEditor is the only 3rd party RTE officially compatible with Adobe Air.

The new version of FCKEditor is named CKEditor. The original name stemmed from the initials of the author, Frederico Caldeira Knabben, but this led to a fair bit of misunderstanding in English-speaking countries :)

NicEdit

openWYSIWYG

PunyMCE

Written by Moxiecode, the makers of TinyMCE (see below), PunyMCE is an extremely lightweight RTE build specifically for adding richer capabilities to Comments and Forum posting mechanisms, where richer HTML entry is both unnessecary, and unsafe.

With a gzipped footprint of only 9KB, PunyMCE is worth a look if only simple formatting is required in the data entry. PunyMCE also supports BBCode output in line with it's primary purpose (plugin required).

TinyMCE

TinyMCE has a not-so-tiny reputation in the Open Source CMS world, being the RTE of choice for Wordpress and Silverstripe. While Tiny offers a similar feature set to FCKEditor for free (LGPL), the company only offers it's file and image upload utilities under a commercial licence. This, however has prompted a few opensource image manager plugins to appear for TinyMCE.

On disk, TinyMCE has roughly half the footprint of FCKEditor.

WhizzyWig

GPL-ish licence. Has a 'clean' function that does a pretty good job of tidying up trashed markup. 2009: Produces XHTML, image insert is only by url - no upload function. No development from March 2007 until a new update was released in June 1009

widgEditor

WYMEditor

WYMeditor's main concept is to leave details of the document's visual layout, and to concentrate on its structure and meaning, while trying to give the user as much comfort as possible (at least as WYSIWYG editors).

WYMeditor has been created to generate perfectly structured XHTML strict code, to conform to the W3C XHTML specifications and to facilitate further processing by modern applications.

WysiHAT

Xinha

Xinha (pronounced like Xena, the Warrior Princess) is a powerful WYSIWYG HTML editor component that works in Mozilla based browsers as well as in MS Internet Explorer. Its configurabilty and extensibility make it easy to build just the right editor for multiple purposes, from a restricted mini-editor for one database field to a full-fledged website editor. Its liberal, BSD licence makes it an ideal candidate for integration into any kind of project.

YUI Rich Text Editor

YUI RTE from Yahoo is a simple, yet well built and extensively documented RTE.

While not as popular amoung open source developers as TinyMCE and FCKEditor, it is quickly gaining popularity through YUI library developers.

Feature set is rather basic, and image handling is by URL only (no upload functionality). However it does offer a couple of interesting plugins for bloggers, in it's Flickr and Calendar plugins

Commercial Solutions

wysiwygPro

This is a commercial offering from VizMetrics Inc that gains inclusion on this page as it is available as a PHP class, as well as a plugin for Wordpress, Joomla!, and Drupal.

At the time of writing, licence cost range from $USD64 for a single domain license, to $USD1397 for an Unlimited Distribution license.

research paper

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