The new Ephox Enterprise TinyMCE site has now gone live, a result of our new partnership with Moxiecode, the company behind everyone’s favorite open source editor TinyMCE. I’m really excited about the potential of this partnership and have really enjoyed the opportunity to work with the Moxiecode team so far.

What We’re Adding…

We think we can bring a lot to the TinyMCE community, the things below are just where we’re starting.

Enterprise Grade Support

We’re really proud of the level of support we’ve been able to offer for EditLive! and we’re bringing that over to TinyMCE. TinyMCE gets used in all kinds of mission critical systems where down time costs real money. Ephox’s support packages offer service level agreements to ensure you get help quickly and keep things running smoothly.

More Resources for TinyMCE

Ephox is dedicating resources to help develop TinyMCE, improve it’s quality, answer questions on the forums (even for the free LGPL version) and generally help make TinyMCE even better.

We’ve already had a number of patches accepted into the main TinyMCE branch and are using our build farm to run TinyMCE’s tests across a wide range of browsers and platforms to help the Moxiecode team keep quality levels high (check out the results here). You’ll also see Ephox folk popping up in places like the TinyMCE forums to answer TinyMCE questions.

Quick and Easy Commercial Licensing

If you don’t want to distribute changes you make to TinyMCE under the LGPL or prefer a more traditional commercial software license for whatever reason, you can quickly and easily buy one straight from our web store, with our without a support package.

Express Edit

We’re currently working to update our “Express Edit” feature of EditLive! to make it simple to integrate both EditLive! and TinyMCE with the same set of APIs and have the most appropriate editor for the situation load. Express Edit has been around for a while, but with the power of TinyMCE we think it’s time has really come to shine. With Express Edit you can offer all the advanced features of EditLive! but know that if Java isn’t available or you just need a lightning fast editor to make a quick change you’re users will have TinyMCE available too. Basically, you get the best possible editor for any situation.

Committed To…

In case you were worried there’s a few things that we’re absolutely committed to:

EditLive!

We still see EditLive! as being Microsoft Word for the web. It’s a full featured, enterprise editor that dramatically improves author productivity and assists them in creating higher quality content. EditLive! has been the leading online editor for many years now and we are going to continue improving it as fast as we can. There’s plenty of great stuff coming down the pipeline for EditLive! including of course an improved Express Edit.

Open Source

Ephox as a company may not have had much to do with open source in the past, but most of the people working for Ephox have and we’re big fans. Now we get the privilege of working with the vast TinyMCE community and that’s really exciting.

Most importantly, TinyMCE is absolutely still available under the LGPL, Ephox is even providing a direct download link from our site to ensure everyone knows they are quite welcome to take TinyMCE and use it for free. The only difference between the LGPL community edition download and the commercially licensed options we’re providing is the license information.

TinyMCE

Ephox and Moxiecode are working together closely on this venture. Ephox Enterprise TinyMCE is a distribution of TinyMCE, much like projects such as Debian include other open source products. Like Linux distributions we may find and need to fix problems with TinyMCE which causes our distribution to vary slightly until those changes can flow back upstream. To avoid any confusion, Ephox distributions of TinyMCE have an extra component to the version number, for example the current TinyMCE release is 3.3.6, so the current Ephox distribution is 3.3.6-170. This makes it clear which base version of TinyMCE is being used, that it’s been modified (even if only to add our naming) and which build from Ephox it is.

We’ve also called our distribution “Ephox Enterprise TinyMCE”, this is mostly a marketing thing but again it helps to avoid confusion in case there are fixes in our build that haven’t yet made it back upstream.

Questions? Comments?

If you have any questions, concerns or comments feel free to post them below or get in touch with me directly at adrian.sutton@ephox.com or by phone on +44 7 525 806 170 and I’ll do my best to get you an answer.

Ephox EditLive! is now part of the IBM cloud offering on Amazon Web Services. EditLive! OEM edition is bundled in the cloud offering of IBM WCM. This means you can now quickly run up a new instance of IBM’s WCM system on Amazon EC2 and configure it to use EditLive! as the editor.

If you want to take advantage of the extra benefits of the Enterprise Edition (track changes, commenting, accessibility checking, image editing and more), you can install that as normal once the system is running. Currently Ephox doesn’t have per-hour pricing through Amazon but you can contact our sales team so they can discuss the options available.

From the job description:

We are seeking a Software Developer who is experienced in creating sophisticated, highly interactive, JavaScript applications. Ideally we desire someone that has experience in TinyMCE or has experience working as part of an open source project. The right person will have the ability to work remotely in a highly collaborative manner with virtual teams.

I’m pretty excited about this new opening within Ephox. Lots of great stuff to come out of it hopefully, but in particular helping Ephox to start working better with Open Source communities and developing some awesome stuff with JavaScript. While TinyMCE experience is something we’re particularly keen to have “ready to go” if possible, whoever fills this role is going to become a web content editor expert in general from Tiny to CK, Dojo and of course our personal favourite EditLive!

The position is open regardless of your location in the world, though if you happen to be near Brisbane, Maidenhead or Palo Alto we have nice offices you can come in and work from if you like.

Andrew Shebanow in Open Government and PDF:

The issue at hand is not whether governments should pick HTML or PDF. The issue at hand is whether governments are capable of publishing information at all. Show me an HTML creation tool that creates high quality, standards conformant markup from a Word document or any of the zillions of editing tools that government employees use. Now add in all the tools used by people who submit documents to the government. And all the versions of those tools released in the last 20 years. Now make sure that the HTML/XML works correctly even when the user doesn’t have the right browser or the right fonts installed.

I’ve actually worked with a number of government departments who were looking to move more content online and the content conversion problem is definitely a time consuming and challenging part of the problem. That’s precisely why I wind up getting involved, since EditLive! lets you easily copy and paste content from Word documents and produce clean, compliant XHTML. It can even (optionally) strip out inline formatting and leave just the structure like headings, tables and lists.

Furthermore, EditLive! is actually quite good at making sure the HTML works correctly even when the user doesn’t have the right browser or the right fonts installed, especially when it’s been configured to suit the particular content needs. Even with non-technical business authors this can work very well and is doing so for a significant number of government departments.

That’s not to say it’s the whole solution, there are systems out there where it’s hard to convert the content to HTML and where HTML may not be the best format anyway. Some of those cases may work better with PDF but certainly not all of them. To somehow suggest that PDF is a complete and simple solution to publishing information on the web misses quite a lot of the picture. For example:

• How do web site visitors navigate around and get to that PDF data? How do they search and find it? As much time is spent working out navigation structures as it is converting content.
• How do you expose information from databases with regularly changing information? Wouldn’t a HTML representation be easier to generate than PDF in most of these cases?

Putting information on the web is not simple and no single technology is going to make it simple. PDF definitely has it’s place on the web, but so does HTML and a number of other formats. PDF doesn’t alleviate compatibility concerns, not all users have a recent enough PDF reader, not all PDF embed all the fonts and when they do it makes the download very large etc and not all PDFs are standards compliant. Putting non-web stuff on the web is always a big, challenging project, so review the available technologies carefully and pick the ones that best achieve your goals. Very few companies have success with just dumping a whole heap of PDFs on a web server.

I swear, some days you just want to reach into the screen and strangle the blogger on the other end. Jeff Atwood complains that his users commonly fail to read all the helpful hints on how to use their overly complicated, what you see isn’t what you get editor on Stack Overflow:

The ask question page is already dangerously close to cluttered with helpful tips, but apparently these helpful buttons, links, and text are all but invisible to a large segment of the user population. Sure, you could argue that Super User tends to attract less sophisticated users, but I see the exact same problem with programmers on Stack Overflow. As new users, a significant percentage of them can't figure out how to format code, even though there's not only a toolbar button that does it for you, but help text on the right explicitly describing how to do it manually. (Just indent 4 spaces. Spoiler alert!)

So essentially, users don’t find the editor intuitive and the solution they’ve gone with up until now is to add more and more help text to try and teach the user how to use the unintuitive editor. It’s not working. The obvious solution is to escalate the arms race:

More and more, I'm thinking we need to put the formatting help — for new users only — directly in their line of sight. That is, pre-populate the question entry area with some example formatting that is typical of the average question. Nothing complicated. But at least then it'd be in the one — and apparently the only one — place myopic users are willing to look. Right in front of their freakin' faces.

Thankfully the comments are full of people suggesting the right answer – fix the editor so you don’t need instructions to use it. You can always provide a source view for geeks who like to type in markup, but make the default something that just works.

If the mark of a poor tradesman is that they always blames their tools, the mark of a bad UI designer is that they always blame the users. It’s not them, it’s you.