Basically we are taking a little pause until Mozilla guys sort their stuff out and release FF4 or at least 3.7, which we need to execute our evil plan for RightJS 2.2.
Meanwhile I've been working on this puppy
Yup, it's a RightJS based RTE that will most definitely take over the world, and so you started to want it for xmas, I'd like to put some words in about what's what and stuff.
Meet RRTE The Frameless
One of the major differences from usual RTEs is that our RTE (which goes under the codename RRTE) does not use any frakking frames. Instead, it uses an inlined DIV with contenteditable="true" property.
If now you're wondering what it gives you, then this is what:
Because it's an inlined div, all the content inside of it will follow all the styles on the page, which means no more headache with transferring and applying your styles to some iframe. If you take a look at the picture, you'll see that the header text inside of the editor has exactly the same font and size as the header on the main page. The blockquote and pre tags are also painted through usual CSS right on the page.
Secondly, because it's just a small inlined piece of page, RRTE works and feels much faster than any IFRAME based editors. It is super fast, practically it feels almost like a plain textarea element.
Thirdly, because all widgets in RightJS UI are plain elements, you will be allowed to easily access and manipulate any content right inside of the editor via standard API.
Modular
The second most important feature of RRTE is that it will be modular. Unlike all the other heavy duty RTEs, our RTE, by default will be mainly social networks oriented. It's main purpose will be to work as a lightweight embeddable RTE for all sorts of things like comments and blog posts where you already have all styles in place and just need some nice and shiny thing instead of textareas.
For this reason the default package will contain the main core/engine and provide basic editing tools which you can see on the picture above. Currently it weights just 4k of gzipped code (including stylesheets) and my intention is to keep it under 10k size.
And for all the advanced functionality, like file-pickers, fonts, tables, etc. we will have a separated package, which will turn the editor in a normal heavy duty RTE.
Extendable
As you can see, my plan for RRTE is to extend it via plugins. I don't have any intention to implement everything in it, instead of that RRTE will have a proper OOP design in best RightJS traditions, so that you could make your own tools and extensions, using classes and inheritance. In case if you're wondering how it's gonna look like, here is an example how the Save button is implemented
Rte.Tool.Save = new Class(Rte.Tool, {
shortcut: 'S',
initialize: function(rte) {
this.$super(rte);
if (!rte.textarea.form()) {
this.disable();
}
},
exec: function() {
if (!this.disabled) {
this.rte.textarea.form().submit();
}
}
});
RRTE will provide you with basic tools and open API, so I expect it to be pretty civilized and easy to extend.
What and When
Currently I keep all the fun for myself. This thing is not on github yet, basically because I hack and refactor it alot. Some parts are still quite flimsy and as I don't want you to have a wrong impression about it I'm going to keep it locally for the next week or two.
At the moment it appears to me that I'm done on about 40-50%, but as I'm a bit busy those days it is hard to estimate the exact schedule. Judging by my guts I should push something worth of seeing on github in about couple of weeks and probably will have the first release by the end of November/beginning of December.
This is basically it. Enjoy the news!
--
Oh, and one more thing. I could use some help with a default iconset for this widget. Currently I use some free stuff that I found over the internet, but if you can and willing to draw some particularly cool uber-iconset, that would be much appreciated!
