TinyMCE with contenteditable

Question

I have read that TinyMCE have support for contenteditable instead of the textarea / iframe version

Source:

http://www.tinymce.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=22164

It says:

I discovered a configuration property called 'content_editable' in the source code of TinyMCE v3.5.2. This flag prevents an iframe from getting rendered.

Javascript

tinyMCE.init({
    // General options
    mode : "exact",
    element : "my_id",
    theme : "advanced",
    plugins : "table,inlinepopups",
editor_selector : "tinymce",

    // Theme options
    theme_advanced_buttons1 : "bold,italic,underline,strikethrough,formatselect,code",
    theme_advanced_buttons2 : "",
    theme_advanced_buttons3 : "",
    theme_advanced_buttons4 : "",
    theme_advanced_toolbar_location : "external",
    theme_advanced_toolbar_align : "left",
    theme_advanced_resizing : true,
    content_editable: true,

    // Example content CSS (should be your site CSS)
    content_css : "/js/tinymce/examples/css/content.css",

    // Style formats
    style_formats : [
            {title : 'Bold text', inline : 'b'},
            {title : 'Red text', inline : 'span', styles : {color : '#ff0000'}},
            {title : 'Red header', block : 'h1', styles : {color : '#ff0000'}},
            {title : 'Example 1', inline : 'span', classes : 'example1'},
            {title : 'Example 2', inline : 'span', classes : 'example2'},
            {title : 'Table styles'},
            {title : 'Table row 1', selector : 'tr', classes : 'tablerow1'}
    ],

    formats : {
            alignleft : {selector : 'p,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,td,th,div,ul,ol,li,table,img', classes : 'left'},
            aligncenter : {selector : 'p,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,td,th,div,ul,ol,li,table,img', classes : 'center'},
            alignright : {selector : 'p,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,td,th,div,ul,ol,li,table,img', classes : 'right'},
            alignfull : {selector : 'p,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,td,th,div,ul,ol,li,table,img', classes : 'full'},
            bold : {inline : 'span', 'classes' : 'bold'},
            italic : {inline : 'span', 'classes' : 'italic'},
            underline : {inline : 'span', 'classes' : 'underline', exact : true},
            strikethrough : {inline : 'del'},
            customformat : {inline : 'span', styles : {color : '#00ff00', fontSize : '20px'}, attributes : {title : 'My custom format'}}
    },
});

HTML

<div class="tinymce" id="my_id" contenteditable="true">test</div>

What I changed

• I use mode "exact" to make tinyMCE accept a div. http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/Configuration:elements
• I add the ID as element in the JS.
• I have an editor_selector that matches the class.
• I add content_editable and set it to true in the JS.

This happend

Nothing. The script run and gives me no errors. Any hints?

Solution 1

There is no official configuration parameter called 'content_editable', but i found it in the sources.

It is true that tinymce uses a contenteditable iframe to edit its contents. I followed the disscussion, but as Spoke said there would be many tradeoffs and with new browsers you can never be sure how such an editor would react. I would advise not to use such an editor.

Solution 2

TinyMCE 4 has this feature officially supported - see the "inline" example: http://www.tinymce.com/tryit/inline.php

Comments

[Jens Törnell]

Thank you, vote up so far! I however need an editor that adapts to its environment and I found this tifftiff.de/contenteditable/editor.html. It looks like hell but works ok. Not as perfect as TinyMCE but ok. I think editors with contenteditable is the future, even if they need to act correct to work. W3C standard.

[Reinmar]

CKEditor supports inline editing. Check ckeditor.com/demo#inline and e.g. nightly.ckeditor.com/standard/samples/inlineall.html

[NoBugs]

This answer is outdated now as MCE4 comes with inline editing as an option for init setting: tinymce.com/wiki.php/Configuration:inline