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Ask HN: Anybody know a good web-based WYSIWYG HTML editor to integrate?

9 points by lionheart ↗ HN
Hi HN,

I've been scouring the Internet looking for a good HTML editor I can integrate into my web app and haven't found anything that actually looks good.

Has anybody here had success with finding a good editor and integrating it into their application?

I'd appreciate any recommendations.

13 comments

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10smom
how about a bbcode editor?
lionheart
I thought about that, but HTML really is needed since they'll be editing pages on their own subdomains.
lionheart
Does anybody know what Shopify uses for their editor for example?
shantanubala
You've probably already heard of these, but I really wouldn't recommend many of the smaller WYSIWYG editor projects -- they can sometimes be buggy or undeveloped.

You can re-theme TinyMCE if you want a mature, stable, and well-trusted package. The theming system isn't too difficult to learn. http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/tryit/skins.php

Also there's the old FCK Editor that got renamed. http://ckeditor.com/

lionheart
Thanks. I'm looking at both of those now. However it looks like the CK editor's file manager integration is only for PHP and ASP and my app is Ruby.
ryanto
Someone got this working with ruby (rails). There's a gem/plugin out there that gets the file uploading/system working (I believe it relies somewhat on paperclip,etc). Sorry for being so vague, but I'm sure Google will turn up something.
lionheart
Now that's something. I found the link to this if anybody else is interested:

https://github.com/galetahub/rails-ckeditor

I'll have to try it out and see how good it is.

There really is a huge hole in the market for a Rails-integrated WYSIWYG editor. There are tons of PHP ones. What I'm seeing is a lot of people are forced to run PHP on their server just for the editor and load it through AJAX.

Hopefully soon there'll be more ports of editors to Ruby.

Athtar
If you don't mind being on the cutting edge, you can try this: http://www.aloha-editor.com/. It's a HTML5 Editor.

Otherwise, I second the recommendations for TinyMCE and CKEditor.

lionheart
Now that is cool. Thanks for the link. I prefer to be on the cutting edge.
szadok
I am also in the process of building my RoR app and need a wysiwyg editor. I have found a gem which installs tinyMCE on your rails app: https://github.com/kete/tiny_mce It took me 3 minutes to integrate it into my app. My only backdraw is that it lacks the ability to upload an image - so I am looking into that now.

Good luck.