Talking Drupal #438 - CKEditor 4 End of Life

Today we are talking about CKEditor 4 End of Life, Moving to
CKEditor 5, and what you can expect from CKEditor 5 now and in
the future with guest Wim Leers. We’ll also cover CKEditor 5
Premium Features as our module of the week.


For show notes visit:
www.talkingDrupal.com/438
Topics

CKEditor 4 end of life June 2023

Issues people might see if they are still on CKE4

Why a third party library and not roll our own

Are there other alternatives

Why did Drupal decide on CKEditor

Drupal 10 moved to CKE5 How should people update

Upgrade gotchas

What's new in CKE5

What is on the roadmap regarding Drupal and CKE5

Is there going to be a CKE6

Native Web Components

Does CKE in core affect Gutenberg

Resources

CKEditor 4 End Of Life

Contrib

Core, prioritized upstream blockers

Core, all issues blocked on upstream (currently 29), if
we look just at bugs there's 17 (1 of which is critical, 6
major)



Drastically improve the linking experience in CKEditor 5

Drupal Image ability to opt in to SVG image uploads

Native and UX

https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3274635



Extended html filter

Views / ckeditor custom elements

Guests

Wim Leers - wimleers.com Wim Leers
Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Ivan Stegic - ten7.com ivanstegic
MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu


Brief description:

Have you ever wanted to offer your content creators
advanced capabilities like real-time collaboration? There’s a
module for that.



Module name/project name:

CKEditor 5 Premium Features



Brief history

How old: created in Sep 2022 by Wiktor Walc, although
recent releases are by Wojciech (vOYchekh) Kukowski, both of
CKSource, the company behind CKEditor (Wiktor was on episode
372 https://talkingdrupal.com/372)

Current version available: 1.2.5 which works with Drupal
9 and 10



Maintainership

Actively maintained, latest release in the past month

User Guide available, link is in the README

Number of open issues: 16, 8 of which are bugs



Usage stats:

159 sites



Module features and usage

To me, the most compelling features enabled by this
module are the ones that turn your Drupal WYSIWYG into a
robust collaboration tool, similar to what users may be used
to in tools like Google Docs or Office 365

Real-time inline comments and changes from multiple users

Track changes to suggest ways the content could be
improved

A history of changes made in the WYSIWYG, independent of
the saved Drupal revisions

Tag users with @ mentions to have them notified

There’s also a Productivity Pack to enhance your WYSIWYG,
and again some of these will be familiar to users that also
use popular online collaboration tools

A document outline that uses heading within your content
to make navigation for moving quickly within the document

Can generate a linked Table of Contents, which will
automatically update as headings are added or changed

Slash commands to execute actions

Enhanced Paste from Office, to preserve complex incoming
content structures, but with clean HTML as the result

And more!

Another premium feature is the ability to export to Word
or PDF, and it can also restore full screen editing, a
feature that didn’t make the transition from CKEditor 4 to 5,
as part of the open source offering

Finally, it also includes an AI Assistant that provides
yet another interesting way to empower your content authors
to leverage AI tools for their writing, including the ability
to change the style, length, or tone of selected content
using pre-made prompts, or generate content with custom
queries. It also works with a number of different models out
of the box, so you’re not restricted to ChatGPT

The module is open source but using these premium
features does require a subscription. The pricing will depend
on the number of active users and which features you need, so
if you’d like more information you can use the contact form
at ckeditor.com

Also worth mentioning here that the team at Palantir has
released a YouTube video of an open source collaborative
editor that they’re calling Edit Together. It’s based on the
ProseMirror rich-text editor framework, and the blog where
they announced it mentioned a mid-2024 release, but that was
back in Jul 2023 and I haven’t been able to find any updates
since then