Nevow + WYSIWYG Editors

nevow :: formal :: javascript

Due to pressing needs of a couple projects, I finally sat down today
and reviewed some of the JavaScript WYSIWYG textarea widgets/HTML
editors. Because of my exposure to Zope and Plone,
Kupu and
Epoz
were the ones that leapt most readily to mind. A quick google exposed
two others that I had forgotten about:
TinyMCE and
FCKEditor.

The nice thing about the latter two is the fact that they can more or
less be used with any web-based application. Kupu is striving for that,
but (as far as I can tell) it's still somewhat of a pain integrating
it. Tiny and FCK have options for integration via simple JavaScript
hooks. My preference is for Tiny, given that it loads WAY faster,
provides exactly what I need, has a code base orders of magnitude
smaller (only kidding a little bit), and has a cleaner look.

I'm a pretty big fan of the
formal
library (formerly know as "forms") by Matt Goodall of
pollenation.
I've used it a fair amount when building Nevow apps and the only
limitation I've personally run across involved trying to get it to work
with cred logins (probably *my* limitation). Today, I needed to add
support for WYSIWYG editors, and it was super easy. I wrote up some
examples on the wiki
here,
but it really just boils down to adding the JavaScript hooks in the
HTML "title" (using stan or *TML templates). The image attached to this
blog post is a screenshot of the "formal" example I put together to
demonstrate functionality. For the curious, here is my set of
TinyMCE toolbar customizations.

It really is the little things, though. Users of the Nevow apps where I
will be adding this are now ecstatic. And to be honest, I'm very stoked
too. It's almost as much fun as MochiKit, but that's for another blog
entry...