Rough With The Smooth

Rough: InnovaEditor, the standard editor we've been using on mee.nu since the beginning, has been end-of-lifed.

Smooth: It's being replaced by InnovaStudio's new Live Editor, which looks awesome.



Smoother: Existing customers get a free license for the new editor.

Rough: The new editor doesn't come with source code, where the old one did.

Rougher: A source code license is $1099.

Roughest: Which goes up to $1500 after Saturday.

Smoothest: They're already working on the features I need, so I don't need to buy the source code license.

InnovaStudio Live Editor and InnovaStudio tech support get the coveted doesn't suck award. Recommended. Just $70 for an unlimited site single developer license.

Updates after the jump.

Update: There are five functions I want to include that require modification:

1. Use simple <i> <b> <u> etc rather than <span style=...>. I can implement this server-side with a parser/rewriter routing; ugly, but feasible.
2. A real blockquote function. Not sure quite how to do that one.
3. Embed pictures from your uploaded files, using the new file browser and formatter, which natively only supports Flickr. This can be done without modifying the editor - they provide sample code.
4. The same for videos - it natively supports only Youtube. Harder.
5. The same for fonts as well - since we have a nice library of fonts already on mee.nu.
   
6. Switch the standard JQuery lightbox out for a preferred one. That can also be done by fussing with the HTML server-side.
   

So 1, 3 and 6 can be done without the source. 4 and 5 are nice-to-haves. 2 I really want, and it's supported by the alternate editor (from the Dojo toolkit), but I'm not sure how to achieve it.

Update: Ah, they still provide source for the asset managers - the image, video, and font selection popups. That means that the only one I seem to need source for is 2.

Since we already have a [blockquote] tag, I'm not that fussed about this feature, and it may be that I can work out how to implement it based on the font selector - since I have that source and it applies styles to selected text.

Update 3: I got an email back from InnovaStudio. They say no dice on the simple markup (kind of expected; the editor is aimed at producing clean XHTML rather than the lazy semi-valid HTML I generate) , but they will be adding a blockquote button. They're already working on expanding the video selector too. That saves me a thousand bucks, so I'm going to renew my license for another year even though it's not expired yet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:16 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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