[development] rich text editor

[Jamie Holly]

I was pretty much in the same position as you with Firedoglake and 
Crooks & Liars, even though they use Wordpress (despite my efforts to 
get them to move to Drupal LOL), TinyMCE is still used for the post 
editor and they both have a lot of contributors that love to directly 
paste from Word into TinyMCE. What I ended up doing was using 
HTMLPurifier as an extra level of filtering on form submits. It has 
worked out great for filtering out all the extra crap Word puts in. The 
only problem people have had was using indent in Word as a blockquote 
and losing that (since it does an actual indent with paragraph styling).

The best part has been that I haven't had a single problem with a tag 
left unclosed since using that. Before making this move, I was getting 
an email every day or so where someone pasted something in and it broke 
the layout. In 3 months of using this system, I haven't had any. The 
only few emails I got was from people pasting into the RTE (usually from 
Gmail) and losing the text, simply because it was included inside some 
javascript that GMail uses. That does force them to use the "paste as 
text" or "paste as word" button more.

We don't use RTE for comment posting, but it is used for the comment 
moderators when editing comments. The comments are still ran through 
HTMLPurifier when submitted and has ran great.

The only other problem I ran into was with embeds being pasted directly 
into the post. To fix that I ended up grepping out all embed code and 
replacing it with a token prior to running through purifier. Afterwards 
the tokens are replaced back with the actual embed code. This opened up 
another feature I introduced of creating whitelists/blacklists for the 
embeds. I can decide which domains to allow/disallow embedding from and 
check them before reinserting the embed code into the post.

Jamie Holly
http://www.intoxination.net     http://www.hollyit.net
Skype:intoxination        Phone: 1-513-252-2919



Sean Robertson wrote:
> > Disallowing paste might actually help solve my other issue. If they can't
> > paste from Word, then they can't paste some document prepared for some other
> > media and have to think about typing something more in the web idiom.
>
> My clients would kill me if I did that.  The problem is that in 
> political campaigns, much of what's posted has to get vetted by several 
> people, and these people are all older types who seem to have to see it 
> in a word doc before it's real to them.
>
>
>