Hi Deane,

For EPiServer 7 we recommend downloading a separate version of TinyMCE instead of using EPiServer's own.

http://world.episerver.com/Documentation/Items/Developers-Guide/EPiServer-CMS/7/Editing/Customizing-the-TinyMCE-Editor/#TemplatePage

But how do I get the EPiServer-specific customizations in there?  For instance, the hyperlink dialog box and image selector?  Is this possible, or is it only possible to edit pages in full Edit Mode?

Good question Deane. As TinyMCE will be more and more tightly integrated with the UI, it will become harder and harder to use TinyMCE outside of it.

Maybe a UX developer have any good tips on how this could be accomplished.

They do not recommend in 7.1 but if you find the old documentation for 7.0 it will work just great. but as toni said that editor will also be upgraded when you get new versions of edit ui.. I use the standalone version and you can use the same plugins as episerver. or you download you own plugins and custimize them as you like.

The biggest thing is the hyperlink button -- I really need that to work.  This doesn't look THAT tightly bound to Edit Mode as it essentially functions the same in 7 as it did in 6.

Hi Deane!

Some background:

The Tiny MCE editor used in EPiServer CMS 7.0 is the 3.3 version and that's still pretty much the same as was used in EPiServer CMS 6. In the 7.1 add-on a new instance of Tiny MCE was added (version 3.5) that's now a part of the CMS UI add-on. The old one still exists but is only used for for dynamic content/dynamic properties. We will remove the old version going forward...

As Tony mentioned, we decided to move away from having an editor that would support running both in the editorial interface as well as the web site. This was mainly because of the time it takes to maintain this and constraints this gives to the development team. Also, to get a fully functioning editor (even for CMS 5-6) you needed to open up quite a lot of parts of the editorial interface from a security perspective to be able to load scripts and dialogs. The link dialog has been completely rewritten in EPiServer CMS 7.5 to be much easier, support new content based assets as well as being pluggable (EPiServer Commerce uses this to add the posibility to link to items in the catalog).

With the above said, I think that it will be very hard (and also not supported) to get this working on the web site. It is, however, possible to add new views to the user interface. This should be faily easy (depending on the requirements of course). Could this be an alternative for you?

That certainly sounds promising.  What we're looking for the ability to quick write a new post or edit a page without cranking up the entire edit interface.  I'd be interested in whatever documentation you might have about these "new views to the user interface."

Let me clarify a bit --

We're looking to enable editing by completely untrained users.  An employee should be able to look at a page on their intranet, see an "Edit This Page" link, click it, and be presented with a big WYSIWYG editor.  I realize there's a lot of advanced functionality they don't need (and would need to be trained on), but we're trying to get them 90% of the way there.  To this end, I need the hyperlink and image buttons, at the very least.

This is our impetus for stripping away the rest of Edit Mode.  It would still be there and available, for more advanced users, but 90% of the user base should be able to edit or create most of a page intuitively with zero training or documentation.

Will I be able to craft an edit view that enables me to do this?

Ok, the requirements are pretty clear and it's something that I have been thinking about when removing the "publishing guides" functionality that existed in EPiServer CMS 6 that was targetting the same audience but was rarely used. I probably need to do some coding to see if this is possible to accomplish with a reasonable amount of code so I hope that I can get some time for that soon.

I worry that the app is getting inextricably bound to the provided interface.  While I know that there's an API, some large sections of editorial functionality are hard-bound to the interface it comes with.  If there's a way to break this binding, I'd breathe a lot easier.

Any progress on this?

Not from our side. We essentially abandoned trying and are rolling our own interface for community-ish, which sucks, but we see little choice.

We are not doing anything either. I suggest that you download your own editor if you want to run outside the EPiServer UI. We might we to a step where you can instantiate Tiny MCE from your own custom UI view, but it's nothing that is high up in priority right now.

I did this a while ago because we had already used the EPiServer WYSIWYG and content picker bits in something that ran outside of the EPiServer 6 interface, and our customer wanted to upgrade to 7.5. Had no choice but to do this:

http://world.episerver.com/Modules/Forum/Pages/Thread.aspx?id=85047

It was not fun to write. The bits of the new UI are very sparsely documented. Also, since this is unsupported it's of course possible it's going to break in a future update (we have used it on up to 7.6).