The geniuses at Oracle have added Ephox as the new Contribution editor - but crippled it to make it look like their old editor. Newsflash to Oracle - the old editor sucked, why are you making the new one pretend to work the same as the old one?
Ephox comes with a WordCount feature, Find/replace, forms editing and even multimedia support. It has a menubar and can be configured for multiple toolbars. Why did Oracle remove these features?
Anyway, to turn that stuff back on you just need to edit the XML config file. Naturally the Oracle guys thought that was too simple so they generate the XML "on the fly" from a Javascript file. To edit the config for the wysiwyg element, hack this file:
/weblayout/resources/wcm/sitestudio/elements/wysiwyg/wysiwyg.config.js
The XML syntax you need can be found in the Developer guide at the Ephox website.
http://www.ephox.com/developers/editliveforjava/v60/DeveloperHTML/index.html
Overall I'm pretty happy with the Ephox editor. My big gripe is that it uses a Java applet - Ephox seem to have abandoned any non-Java versions. Applets are horrible on websites - all your contributors will need Java on their machines. I've seem some weird repainting from the applet and it can be unstable, it's slow to load, who knows which Java version to trust. I mean, I'm on a webpage, I'm editing a webpage, it's rendering a webpage - why force it through Java? Hmmm I appear to be ranting, let me start again...
Overall I'm pretty happy with the Ephox editor. Apart from relying on a silly applet :) the code it produces is clean and well structured. Ephox have some nifty features like Accessibility reports, thesaurus and WordCount. I've upgraded to SiteStudio260 and the Ephox java is quite stable. The only hiccup I've had was that it couldn't tell the difference between a print and a screen stylesheet. I put a few support requests through to the Ephox people and they responded promptly and helpfully. If you're considering an upgrade, go for it.
Hi Michael,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your positive comments. Its great to see such an active community around Oracle UCM. Your observations about the default Oracle xml config are enlightening. If fact this is an area that very few of our customers take advantage of. This config file can be used to provide different UI's for different users and create custom buttons for common tasks.
With respect to the applet issue: The feedback we have received from our customers indicates that content editors are not concerned about what the underlying technology is, provided that it does its job well.
However, in response to sustained objections from developers and analysts, we have included a well known open source JavaScript editor as part of our Express Edit mode. This feature was not included in our Oracle license, but it can be purchased directly from us. ExpressEdit mode is intended for those (somewhat rare) cases where the editor does not have java installed on their local machine.
We had to disable many features because javascript editors do not behave consistently across different platforms and operating systems. Other features simply did not work across our extensive bank of test cases. The applet gives us full control over the UI, rendering, tidying up the HTML and the ability to provide usable features such as a drop down menu.
The drop down menu may seem trivial, but for your typical business user its critical as they need a look and feel that is familiar. Our look and feel reference point is MS Word. For better or worse it is the de facto editing standard for most business people.
On the matter of speed, once the applet has loaded, reload times are pretty quick and for content heavy pages we see the applet editor loading faster than the AJAX alternatives.
We continue to evaluate other technologies to improve the editor user experience, but for now applets are the best option.
Marco Gabbiani
Director Marketing
Ephox
Marco, my comments on the use of Java would probably start a holy war. My perspective is that I'm a web developer so naturally I'd consider Javascript solutions before Java. I assume your guys are Java developers and would want to stick with what they know, just like I would. But from the perspective of the actual user, you're right - they don't care! In fact the feedback we're getting is that they love it, so congratulations.
ReplyDeleteYes, we don't want to start a flame war. If you are interested, we can give you access to our JavaScript editor to play around with. This is also available to all Oracle customers as an add on to EditLive!
ReplyDeleteMarco Gabbiani
Ephox
Hi Michael,
ReplyDeleteeditlive works great on our clientside too but we are facing a new issue... recently we migrated from stellent 7.5 to ucm 10gr3 and we noticed that we are not able to add script tag inside editlive... it considers the tag as text and converts the '< >' symbols to ascii chars.... previously it was wrkng fine... we are using Editlive 6.0...
do you have any idea if this is a version upgrade issue....
thanks..
I think there is a config flag that tells Ephox to destroy tags that it doesn't recognise. Turn it off and your tags will not be molested. Check the Ephox site for instructions.
ReplyDelete