Hi Michael, ckeditor (http://ckeditor.com/demo) was released just recently, maybe you could ask the dude who reviewed fck what he thinks of it? Word on the net is that ck editor is the successor to fck. On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Michael Pedersen <sku@kaal.dk> wrote:

Hi Davis,

A history of Taesk & editors.

The original design goal was to keep HTML out of the database. We wanted to disallow any form of HTML input by the administrator because we wanted all the websites to display valid HTML. If HTML editing was allowed the result would be that administrators could input some (invalid) HTML which again would turn the actual websites into invalid HTML.

In short we wanted the system to ensure that the the clients websites always contained 100% valid HTML, by making it impossible for administrators to perform any action that would compromise this.

To this end we developed a markup language (a domain specific language) lets call it TML, which would be "compiled" into valid HTML, for this we used a regular textarea as input/editor in the CMS. This method worked technically really well, but over the years the client demand for WYSIWYG editors increased.

We then developed a visual editing feature using the "designmode=true" feature of browsers to actually show and edit HTML directly - but trying hard to limit the type of HTML that it was possible to input, but we still insisted on not putting HTML directly into the database (and onwards to the actual website), so we had to develop a HTML -> TML compiler/converter - this is a real nightmare I can tell you... Anyway after much work we got it working to a "satisfying" degree.

One problem that existed with this way forward was that clients quite often liked to copy&paste content directly from Microsoft Word and into the editor - and out HTML->TML compiler although "good" was simply not good enough to handle the HTML that Microsoft word outputs. At the same time competing CMS' boasted of exactly this feature, which they had an easy time doing since they allowed HTML to be inputted and saved directly into the database (in short they just saved and used the HTML output from MS Word). So pressure increased to provide this feature as well.

In the end we had to give in and abandon our TML way, and adapt a "common" dhtml editor (little reason to develop our own). For this purpose we evaluated a number of the available editors.

I was not the person who evaluated the different editors (I quickly asked he said: Look&Feel and features) - we wanted an editor that was flexible enough to allow us to integrate it with our custom media-archive (unlike other systems all binary files are kept in a database as well as a static file on disk), and I seem to recall that FCK was the only editor that allowed us to customize/integrate it without too much trouble. I do know that we started by evaluating FCKeditor then moved on to other editors, but they were not as flexible enough, only to end up with FCKeditor again.

One reason from a business perspective is that FCK offers a dual licensing scheme - and allowed us to acquire a closed source license that would enable us to continue to sell Taesk with its own closed source license..

I hope this answers your question.

n.b. for the record I still believe that the TML way is the technical superior, since once we have the content internally in our own markup language we can then compile it to various formats from there e.g. WML, HTML, XML, etc.. But I do understand that the usability of a dhtml-editor is far superior.

Regards Michael

Davis Waithaka wrote:

...

Hi Michael,

Congrats on TAESK. Is there specific reasons you chose FCK editor over other editors eg TinyMCE (i have a serious interest in this question)

Davis ------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Hi Benjamin, Let me answer your questions one at a time:

Does the CMS support custom development of applications within the content manager

I can understand your question in two ways: A: Is it possible to insert your custom applications into the Taesk interface ? You can definetly do this - we do it all the time, Taesk usually covers 80% of the functionality that our clients ask for, the remaining 20% are custom for that particular client and is developed and "plugged" into Taesk B: Is it possible from within the actual CMS interface to "develop" the sites/modules/whatever ? The answer is a very clear NO this is not possible, and this is by design! As professional webdevelopers our stance is that there is nothing worse than when you have to edit the html/css/code/whatever from within the CMS itself. First of in this situation you can't use your regular development tools and environment resulting in reduced productivity. Second it would add more features/buttons/interfaces that the regular content administrator would have to "understand not to click" and that would reduce the usability for those people. Taesk is first and foremost a CONTENT management system - not a "design management system" - and we take that quite literally.

secondly can i develop my custom modules within the framework.and finally what are

Absolutely (see point A above) - Taesk is designed to assist webdevelopers creating great websites by providing a lot of "ground" functionality which can make it very easy to build custom functionality. It is however also possible to code "old ugly php" completely independent of Taesk and then integrating it. In other words - Taesk is very very flexible when it somes to what you can do with it, both in terms of design but also in terms of custom development.

the listed drawbacks that the CMS has over other CMS in the market

This is a hard question. Right now the biggest drawback is the lack of public documentation, the second problem is low adaptation since up until now (where we have open sourced it) it has mainly been ourself who has used it. From a more technical point of view I would probably point to a relative low amount of available custom modules - if you look at e.g. Joomla you can find a ton of strange code bits/modules that does just about everything you ever dreamed about - Taesk on the other hand is more giving you some building blocks that you can combine in 1001 unique ways and thereby create some of the same functionality - but you have to stack the building blocks yourself! Even more concrete: without using a custom products database it can be hard to use Taesk for scale to e-commerce solutions containing really many products - understand me right - we have created many e-commerce solutions using Taesk, but if they are bigger than a certain size then you need to do some custom development. I could probably come up with 1000 other examples - like any other software/tool it is all about choosing the right tool for the job, and where Taesk really shines is when you (as a professional developer) need to create "regular" websites that are administrated by non-technical people Enjoy Michael Pedersen

Hi Peter, I did, he likes it very much. Yes it is the new fck-editor, infact as I understand it it is a complete rewrite of fck editor. At the time we were looking for a new editor it was only in development and was not useable for our needs - but can can quite possibly see Taesk change to using CKeditor a few releases down the road... Enjoy Michael Pedersen Peter Karunyu wrote:

Hi Michael, ckeditor (http://ckeditor.com/demo) was released just recently, maybe you could ask the dude who reviewed fck what he thinks of it? Word on the net is that ck editor is the successor to fck.