I’m very excited to make this announcement and I can’t wait to get your feedback about the version 2 of our WYSIWYG HTML editor. Yes, you’ve read well. The version 2 of our editor is now ready for you to play around with it after over 6 months of intense research and development. You can try it right away on our website or download it and start integrating it into your application.
I’m pretty sure I could spend hours telling you about the new things from version 2, but I will just mention the most important changes in the new version and you can find the full list in the Changelog.
Refreshed design
The design of the version 2 follows the main lines of the old editor, but adds the fresh look that Google brings in Material Design and we’re sure you’ll love. Diana explained in an older blog post our position about Material Design and you will definitely see it reflecting in the editor’s UI: button tooltips, larger button space or subtle animations. However, the major design change is reflected in the popups where we made the UI cleaner and where we have separated each possible action to avoid confusions.
Better code structure
With 71Kb smaller than the old editor, the new version is faster and has a modular design which makes the code easier to understand and further extend. Besides that, we introduced 108 new methods, 21 new events and 56 new options. I am sure this opens great development possibilities to create custom plugins and interact with the editor like never before.
Redesigned plugins
The core of the editor comes now with basic functionality and lots of room for extending it. That allowed us to implement the link, image, paragraph, quote, align and code view features as separate plugins. We had lots of requests for disabling the image or link feature all together and there is no point in including additional code if you don’t need it. Additionally, we’re adding two new plugins: emoticons for a plus of joy in your application and line breaker to make new lines easier to use.
Focus on Mobile
Almost two years ago when we started our WYSIWYG journey rich text editors weren’t Retina Ready and mobile experience was very poor. With the new version we’re focusing more than ever on the mobile experience, by adding special options to the toolbar for an enhanced editing experience so that you can customize what buttons to show based on the screen size. Moreover, the toolbar automatically gets placed in the best position while editing on iOS or Android to avoid interaction with the native browser controls.
Now that you got a taste of our new editor, I’m sure you’re wondering what’s next. For the next month, the new version is Release Candidate and we plan that on 1st of October to finish the RC phase. During RC, we’ll improve the documentation to ease the integration process and we’ll update one by one the framework plugins for Ruby on Rails, AngularJS, MeteorJS, Django, Symfony, CakePHP and EmberJS.
If you have any thoughts or suggestions please feel free to share them in the comments below or contact us directly.
