Hi! Have any plan to use ckeditor 5 in XWiki?

Help / Discuss
1

I found ckeditor 5 has more cool features ,better UI and experience for user .

1 Like
2

There’s nothing planned for the moment, but we will surely upgrade at some point. CKEditor 4 is still supported and with the limited man power we have and considering the other items we have in the roadmap, there’s no pressing need at the moment to upgrade.

3

OK, Thanks

4

+1 for CKEditor 5. The Real-time collaborative editing is huge, and it looks like attachment handling and table creation has been vastly improved.

5

+1 for CKEditor 5 - huge improvements for end users

6

We’d love to move to CK5. One important issue is that CK5 has changed the way it works and our realtime implementation cannot be plugged easily anymore in it. CK5 does offer a realtime implementation too, as mentioned above. However, it’s based on services provided by a company and for which you need a subscription to.

From Real-time collaboration feature integration | CKEditor 5 Documentation

The real-time collaboration feature needs a cloud service to synchronize content between the clients, so first you need to sign up to the Collaboration service powered by CKEditor Cloud Services. Refer to CKEditor Cloud Services Collaboration - Quick Start for more details.

More generally speaking it seems that CK5 is going in the direction of providing added-value services through a cloud connection which requires a subscription. While I understand the business model, it doesn’t sit that well with XWiki offering a fully operational wiki fully open source and that can work fully on premises.

So we need to decide what we’re going to do, including the option of moving to another WYSIWYG editor. We still need to spend some more time to investigate if we could hack our realtime code into CK5 (doesn’t seem easy to do at all so far).

1 Like
7

The fact is, you’re in the business of writing the xwiki software, not in the business of writing the plugin editors, so unless someone can come up with the money to spend on changing the CK5 editor to fit in xwiki, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

8

We even developed a full-fledged WYSIWYG editor in the past! (we were using TinyMCE before that and it wasn’t good enough for us, and then later we moved to CK) :slight_smile:

Now we do develop a lof of plugins for CK and I’m sure you’re very happy about that since otherwise you wouldn’t be able to insert macros in WYSIWYG, or have auto suggestion for creating links in WYSIWYG, nor be able to type “[”, etc. All this to say that developing plugins is not new and it’s also necessary. I don’t see that stopping anytime soon (not until CK Source itself or the CK community develop exactly what we need which is unlikely since it’s specific to XWiki). Now our preference always go in the direction of the less custom development possible ofc!

Note that the “someone” you mention has been so far a mix of:

  • XWiki SAS who has sponsored most of the WYSIWYG work
  • Some XWiki SAS clients who sponsored some WYSIWYG work too
  • Some French and European research projects who have also sponsored some WYSIWYG work

Back to realtime, it’s an important feature we wanted to have working and integrated in XS in 2020 but we failed to achieve it and focused on other topics instead. It’s something we still want for 2021 though and dropping support for it in the WYSIWYG (i.e. relying on CKSource one) would be a hard choice (nothing has been decided yet).

Thanks for your POV!

2 Likes
9

It’s been almost three years now. Is there anything new on this front, e.g. staying with v4, switching to v5, or switching to another editor altogether?

10

Good question. Hard topic. AFAIR, the latest discussions have been around moving to new way of editing wiki content by using a block editor but I don’t think much work has been done in designing this yet, nor discussed on the forum. We need to move forward on this, thanks for the reminder.

Note that CK4 is still supported on our side and that we continue to improve our WYSIWYG editor.

11

CKEditor 5 is licensed under the GPL 2+ while XWiki is using LGPL 2+. Including CKEditor 5 would therefore change the license of the XWiki distribution to GPL 2+ according to my understanding (I’m not a lawyer). Therefore, it is very unlikely that XWiki will ever ship with CKEditor 5 as it’s core editor. Switching to another editor seems way more likely as the way forward.

12

I am not a lawyer either, but my general understanding is that the difference between LGPL and GPL is that LGPL’d code can be used in code of any license provided that any modified LGPL’d source is published where, in contrast, GPL’d code requires that any projects that use the GPL’d code are also licensed under the GPL. As far as I know, LGPL is mostly used in order to allow for things like libraries to be used in proprietary products without requiring the proprietary project to be open-source. Assuming that I’m understanding the LGPL vs. GPL situation correctly and assuming that there is not a more viable alternative to CK5 out there, would it be out of the question to switch XWiki to a GPL license in order to make it compatible with CK5? (Or maybe even dual-license where the CK4 version is LGPL’d and the CK5 version is GPL’d?) Or is the intent to allow proprietary/commercial products to integrate XWiki into their code bases?

Again, I am not a lawyer, but I’m just trying to understand the possibilities here.

13

Yes, I’m not sure that the committers would be open to change this as so far we’ve wanted to be more permissive than GPL and also be “business-friendly” to some extent.

Also note that the license is not the only problem for CK5, there are more and more features that require a paying subscription to CKSource (like realtime - the XWiki realtime feature might be a lot more difficult to plugin in CK5 than it was in CK4 from an initial analysis).

Last, we find that modern block editors could be an interesting approach for editing in XWiki.

14

regarding a message on ckedit:
**CKEditor 4 reached its End of Life (EOL) in June 2023.** From then on, it will receive no more updates, new features, bug fixes, and security patches. Visit [CKEditor 5 Docs](https://ckeditor.com/docs/ckeditor5/latest/installation/index.html) for the actively supported CKEditor or check [Extended Support Model](https://ckeditor.com/docs/ckeditor4/latest/support/licensing/extended-support-model.html).
does xwiki have a plan to go forward here?

1 Like
15

This message does not appear anymore.

See Loading... and CKE Editor warning 4.22.1 version not secure for more details and a workaround to remove it in older versions of XWiki.

16

Hello,
In this thread, I have read about the pros and cons about changing the version or the brand of the editor in XWiki, while so much work is going on in the development process as a whole.
I just want to point out for reference if it might be useful : TinyMCE has realtime collaborative edition, among many other features, is licensed under the GPL v2, and also provides an LTS version.

17

TinyMCE is not an option. First this is what XWiki was using in the past and we dropped it. Second, GPL is not a compatible license (XWiki is LGPL).

If you’re interested in seeing discussed alternatives, please see https://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/RichEditorRealtimeEditing

Thanks

1 Like
18

Licenses world is indeed a complicated one even among the FLOSS ones. Various Licenses and Comments about Them - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation