I found ckeditor 5 has more cool features ,better UI and experience for user .
Thereās 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, thereās no pressing need at the moment to upgrade.
OK, Thanksļ¼
+1 for CKEditor 5. The Real-time collaborative editing is huge, and it looks like attachment handling and table creation has been vastly improved.
+1 for CKEditor 5 - huge improvements for end users
Weād 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, itās based on services provided by a company and for which you need a subscription to.
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 doesnāt 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 weāre 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 (doesnāt seem easy to do at all so far).
The fact is, youāre 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, itās not likely to happen anytime soon.
We even developed a full-fledged WYSIWYG editor in the past! (we were using TinyMCE before that and it wasnāt good enough for us, and then later we moved to CK)
Now we do develop a lof of plugins for CK and Iām sure youāre very happy about that since otherwise you wouldnāt be able to insert macros in WYSIWYG, or have auto suggestion for creating links in WYSIWYG, nor be able to type ā[ā, etc. All this to say that developing plugins is not new and itās also necessary. I donāt see that stopping anytime soon (not until CK Source itself or the CK community develop exactly what we need which is unlikely since itās specific to XWiki). Now our preference always go in the direction of the less custom development possible ofc!
Note that the āsomeoneā 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, itās 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. Itās 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!
Itās 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?
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 donāt 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.
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 (Iām not a lawyer). Therefore, it is very unlikely that XWiki will ever ship with CKEditor 5 as itās core editor. Switching to another editor seems way more likely as the way forward.
I am not a lawyer either, but my general understanding is that the difference between LGPL and GPL is that LGPLād code can be used in code of any license provided that any modified LGPLād source is published where, in contrast, GPLād code requires that any projects that use the GPLād 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 Iām 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 LGPLād and the CK5 version is GPLād?) Or is the intent to allow proprietary/commercial products to integrate XWiki into their code bases?
Again, I am not a lawyer, but Iām just trying to understand the possibilities here.
Yes, Iām not sure that the committers would be open to change this as so far weāve wanted to be more permissive than GPL and also be ābusiness-friendlyā 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.