I’ve been distracted again by a bug in the static page editor in 0.9.8. After some investigation it became clear that this wasn’t just a small issue, but the editor is, in fact. unusable.

Looking back it is clear that moving to a single point of entry for all ZenMagick admin pages (via zmIndex.php), while being a good idea, has caused all these problems. In short: there is a lot of JavaScript missing.

Looking at the code and all the hacks around WYSIWYG support in zen cart (and the same code in the ZenMagick static page editor) I decided that ZenMagick could do better. So, after a couple days of hacking I present a new and simple API (well, just a matter of three settings) to easily add WYSIWYG support in ZenMagick.

Things are really looking good. I’ve used CKEditor and TinyMCE as two candidates to create editor plugins. It’s always good to verify new things with at least two different implementations as that usually really shows if there are any shortcomings. Each plugin took so far perhaps 3 hours. Most of that time was to figure out how to create the JavaScript required to make things work.

Then, after a suggestion, I added a plugin for xinha. That took about 1 hour

Nothing it perfect, of course, and these plugins are no exceptions. ALthough they are all three usable, there are a few things that could/should be improved:

• Add support for the save button that exists in all toolbars
• Add support for ‘basic’, ‘advanced’ and ‘expert’ level with increasingly blown up toolbars
• Make all work with multiple instances in a single page (I haven’t tested that at all, but at least for xinha its clear that some work will be required to get that working)
• Add an option to each plugin to make it the default editor; right now plaintext is the default and you need to set the default manually

As for the title of this post – I updated the roadmap, so it really isn’t a distration (any more)