IE8 - insert link problem

[joshuag]

Hi all,

I am having trouble with IE8 and the insert link dialog. Seems that whenever I selected a word, click insert link and fill in the information in the modal window and click insert, TinyMCE doesn't recognize my text selection. the <a href> that it creates gets inserted at the beginning of my content in the text editor instead of being wrapped around the word that I had selected. this only happens in IE 8.

I tested the demo of TinyMCE on their website and link insertion works fine... Has anyone else run into this?

Any advice about how I could fix this would be awesome.

thanks in advance,

[ryan]

I just tested here in IE8 too and was able to duplicate it. I tried pulling the latest TinyMCE into ProcessWire and testing, but still doesn't work. Did some searching and found that many other people are running into similar issues with IE8 and various TinyMCE plugins. Apparently IE8 drops the selection when the window focus changes (like when a modal dialog window opens), where other browsers don't. It may be less of a problem if you only have one editor instance on the screen at a time. I'm looking into solutions, but starting to think about trying out CKEditor as an alternative Inputfield option for the textarea field. Not sure how much better it is in IE, but I'm not real comfortable with the amount of workaround/hacks necessary to accommodate various IE8 issues that keep cropping up when writing plugins for TinyMCE. That may just be the nature of the beast though.

[joshuag]

Thanks for looking into this. Interested in hearing what direction you end up taking.

I have just advise people to use Safari/FF/Chrome for now. Better for everyone anyhow.

Thanks for the reply.

[apeisa]

I'm looking into solutions, but starting to think about trying out CKEditor as an alternative Inputfield option for the textarea field. Not sure how much better it is in IE, but I'm not real comfortable with the amount of workaround/hacks necessary to accommodate various IE8 issues that keep cropping up when writing plugins for TinyMCE. That may just be the nature of the beast though.

There is something interesting discussion about TinyMCE & CKeditor (see the comments also - people from both products taking part): http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/tinymce-vs-ckeditor

I do like CKeditor more, but it's just a feeling - no real life experience enough to say which is actually better on this situation.

[ryan]

That's a good link. I've never actually used CKEditor, but my understanding is that it's the next generation of FCKEditor (something that I did use in earlier versions). I definitely preferred TinyMCE after using both of those, but it sounds like CKEditor is a total rewrite and may have an edge on TinyMCE at this point. I'm going to develop an Inputfield module for it so that people have an alternative to TinyMCE with ProcessWire. Hopefully it'll be a little easier than developing the TinyMCE one. But this is a couple months off--I have to finish the rest of PW 2.1 first.

[Adam Kiss]

I remember working both with fck & tinymce before, my experience:

FCKEditor was real pain to setup for me, because (in that time), if you downloaded it, it came with everypossible option & plugin it had and I had really hard time to setup all paths to including files work 100% (either you haven't see pictures in the fckeditor itself or on the page), but I was much worse programmer back then.

TinyMCE was easier to setup, but always felt little more amateurish – from the UI to all the possibilites to Xbrowser compatibility – while FCK maintains most of the features in most used browser working 100% or very close, TinyMCE suffers a lot from various bugs (or not 100% working features) – mostly in webkit (image selection [which, to be fair, doesn't work 100% in FCK either] and others) or opera, which needs a lot of love from TinyMCE.

This ofcourse was back then – now it seems, that TinyMCE got a little ahead of FCKEditor, but the very little I have worked with CKEditor (the new version), it looks much better (default avail. skins), seems to be easier (then FCK) to include in your project and has all the perks – professional crossbrowser compatibility.

That's my, albeit little outdated experience.

[ryan]

Thanks for your analysis of FCK/CK and TinyMCE. I agree with what you've said, you put it into better words than me. That issue with TinyMCE and Webkit (image selection) they claim is not a bug, but rather a lack of support by Webkit for selection of that sort. Though I'm guessing that just means that Webkit doesn't support the way that they want to do it. I'm anxious to experiment with CKEditor.

[Soma]

Have you been able to look at this again? My experience is somehow outdated of these both, haven't used FCK fo a long time.

I'm asking also because clients tend to be on IE 80% of the time (it's a shame) and definately would be great to may have an alternative if TinyMCE is that buggy on IE.

[ryan]

I haven't looked at this in a long time. But I'm hopeful that we can get TinyMCE working in at least IE9 (if it doesn't already). I think the issue was primarily bleed through on dialog boxes (in IE8). Otherwise it generally worked pretty well in IE8. Switching to CKEditor seemed like a possibile alternative, but TinyMCE is in such widespread use (even WordPress) that it seems like maybe it's just a matter of making some yet unknown adjustments in our usage of TinyMCE to make IE happy. So I guess right now I'm feeling like we should stick with TinyMCE and just keep at it unless there's a really compelling reason to pursue CKEditor instead.