I joined Ephox back in May 2002 and over the past eight-and-a-half years have had the pleasure of working with some of the most talented, dedicated, passionate and supportive people I’m ever likely to work with. It’s been an incredibly exciting time doing my small part to grow the company from a small team in Brisbane, Australia, though some very tight times to a very rapidly growing team with offices on three continents that’s firing on all cylinders.
Ephox has had Yonas working on with us on various TinyMCE related stuff for a while but mostly outside of the core source code on plugins for various clients. Today however, his first patch made it through both Ephox QA and the Moxiecode review into the mainline TinyMCE codebase. It will ship as part of the 3.4 release along with a bunch of other Ephox developed fixes and lots of good stuff in general.
Lisa Hill from Blue Fish has published an excellent article covering how to customize the EditLive! rich text editor in Web Publisher. It includes many of my favorite ways to get the most out of EditLive! as well.
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.
We think we can bring a lot to the TinyMCE community, the things below are just where we’re starting.
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.
The other day a couple of surprise packages arrived in the Ephox UK office – our new squishy conference giveaways! The ever popular red sports cars are out and in their place are a cute little Koala and a Kangaroo pair.
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!
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.
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks in Australia for my baby sister’s wedding and while I was there I worked out of Ephox’s Brisbane office where our engineering team is based. It’s been nearly 18 months since I left there to move over to the UK and this is the first trip back since. What was most striking about the trip is just how awesome the team is down there. Technically speaking they are one of the most talented groups of engineers you’re ever likely to come across and pull off some seriously amazing stuff, but more importantly they are a truly great team.
Every so often while using NetSuite, it pops up and asks me to fill in a quick little survey – basically how likely are you to recommend NetSuite and why? This is annoying when your in a rush but on balance not a bad way for them to ensure their customers are happy.
There’s just one catch – every single time I tell them that I’d never recommend NetSuite and that they should improve product quality, specifically they should handle escaping XML tags correctly. As a company that makes HTML editors, we quite often send and receive emails that talk about HTML tags rather than just including them. Unfortunately, NetSuite for the past 5 years or more has happily messed these emails up and we’ve had to come up with complicated ways to get the original email text back out. We’ve reported this to them on multiple occasions and at one point had to actually put in a XSS exploit to get them to understand how big a problem it was. Over time they’ve shifted where the correct HTML will appear in the system, but never actually fixed it entirely.
As promised, a few days ago IBM shipped the OEM edition of EditLive! It’s available to all existing WCM clients on Portal 6.1 or later from passport advantage.
Mostly for my own benefit of having an easier place to find this, it’s version 6.5.3.55 of EditLive! which is a little older than I was expecting, but still quite recent. Enterprise Edition clients (direct from Ephox) have access to the 6.6.2.6 release from early March, which includes a bunch of new features like the inline table toolbars, but my understanding is that IBM will be providing updates fairly regularly which is nice.
Sam Ruby notes that the White House feed contains a fair bit of debris:
Also noted in the process: the feed itself contains a fair amount of debris. A sytle attribute? A meta tag? o:p is common in content carelessly copy/pasted from Microsoft Word. Ah the good old o:p crud from Word. I know a fantastic html editor they could use that would fix that up for them. Clean copy and paste from Word is probably the most popular feature in EditLive!