Wikispaces+Blog

The following was originally published August 5, 2010 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wikispaces/~3/XXx7hLQ9edU/a-new-editor-for-wikispaces.html Over the last few days we’ve been incrementally rolling out a **brand new editor** to everyone who uses Wikispaces. While you may not have noticed a big visual difference, a lot has changed under the hood. This is the story of the third generation Wikispaces editor. Here at Wikispaces HQ we call this project EditorC, pronounced “edit orc.” Pay no attention to the toolbar-wielding orc to the right. He’s really quite friendly. Earlier this year we took a hard look at our current editor. It’s a system that we largely wrote in-house over the last four years and it’s done yeoman’s duty: millions of people have used it to save tens of millions of wiki pages. However, a lot has changed in the world of web browsers since 2006 and in many regards our previous editor wasn’t keeping up with the times. We made the difficult choice to swap out the core of the editor for one based on the popular open source [|TinyMCE] project — the same used by [|Wordpress] and thousands of other applications. Dom, Jeff, and Ryan have been hard at work on this task since then, with copious amounts of support from the rest of the Wikispaces team. So what’s changed?
 * First, the editor looks a bit different. Here are the old and new toolbars:

Most importantly, the new editor provides the foundation for some jaw-dropping features to come. We hope the new editor works well for you. As always, we’d love to hear both the good and bad. Email us at help@wikispaces.com.
 * You’ll notice two new buttons: undo and redo. More on those in a future blog post!
 * The new editor works better in more browsers. We’ve added Chrome support and greatly improved Safari support. You can find our full list of supported browsers on our help wiki.
 * A wide variety of formatting quirks and bugs have been fixed across the board.
 * We streamlined the look of the toolbar and buttons and made a dedicated area for notifications on top of the bar.
 * Warnings when someone else is editing the same page will appear below the editor toolbar rather than in a separate window at the bottom of the page.