phpLinkBid Blog

Several months ago I selected the Xinha editor as the platform for the new WYSIWYG editor in phpLinkBid. I then set off on what amounted to 15-20 hours of development time customizing Xinha. I'm now faced with a big decision - to drop Xinha and all this work in favor of TinyMCE.

A WYSIWYG editor is one of the big improvements in the upcoming version. It will make it much easier and faster to update pages, and users with no HTML experience can have some control over formatting. It isn't exactly something you develop overnight, so I have used Htmlarea - the grandfather of Xinha - for years in my Web apps for WYSIWYG editing. The switch to Xinha was natural when Htmlarea was retired. But it wasn't a decision made for all the right reasons, so I have reviewed every viable solution I can find that is compatible with our commercial license, and which can be integrated seamlessly with phpLinkBid.

For several reasons, I feel the TinyMCE editor might be a better solution. It is very well developed and seems much more mature than Xinha. It's the editor of choice for Wordpress and many other apps, so it isn't dying anytime soon. And while Xinha is a great project, it's based on Htmlarea and seems to contain a lot of legacy code and artifacts from the previous project. It just "feels" very messy to work with at times. So far TinyMCE has been smooth to work with for the most part. It took a while to create a new TinyMCE theme due to a severe lack of updated documentation, so hopefully the rest of the docs are a little more up-to-date.

Why the big rush if Xinha is working already? Because this is most likely the de facto editor in our app for some time to come. Fortunately not all of the work on Xinha is a waste - if TinyMCE proves to be a good solution after a little more testing, it should be a snap to swap out editors. Most of the Xinha customizations can be reused with TinyMCE, but the final test has yet to come.

You can see a demo of each editor linked below. Note that the specific buttons, layout and load times vary a lot on how the editor is implemented.

• TinyMCE Demo
• Xinha Demo
  

For those of you that don't care about WYSIWYG editing, don't worry. You can switch to HTML mode when editing, or turn the system off permanently. If you have any experience or comments on either of these editors, please share.