CFTEXTAREA or FCKEditor?

If you want to add a rich text editor to your forms in ColdFusion 8 it’s as easy as CFTEXTAREA richtext=”true”…

<cftextarea
	richtext="true"
	name="formfieldname"
	toolbar="Basic"
	value="#form.formfieldname#" />

When this tag is called a bundled version of FCKEditor is called in to do the work. This simple solution works well in some situations, but not the one that I ran into the other day.

For example, if you want to customize FCKEditor to disallow users to text formatted in Microsoft Word you will have to edit the FCKEditor config files found in the belly of ColdFusion’s system files. Since I don’t have permissions to edit these files across all of the servers in the environments where my systems are run I’m left with one choice…ignore CFTEXTAREA richtext=”true” all-together and install a separate instance of FCKEditor.

Once you download and unzip FCKEditor you’ll find code samples for a host of languages. There are two examples for ColdFusion…a custom tag that works in versions 4.5.2 and beyond, as well as a ColdFusion Component. I chose to the custom tag as I generally try to shy away from encapsulating display logic in CFCs. I was able to configure and call FCKEditor from my page with a few lines of code.

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<cfscript>
	thisTag.editorArgs.instanceName = "formfieldname";
	thisTag.editorArgs.basePath = "/inc/misc/editor/";
	thisTag.editorArgs.value = form.formfieldname;
	thisTag.editorArgs.toolbarSet = "Basic";
	thisTag.editorArgs.config = StructNew();
	thisTag.editorArgs.config.ForcePasteAsPlainText = true;
</cfscript>
<cfmodule template="/sso/assets/editor/fckeditor.cfm"
	attributeCollection="#thisTag.editorArgs#" />

Yup, it’s that easy. Pretty cool, eh?