vBulletin 4.1.4 : The new all new WYSIWYG text editor powered by CKEditor

Something may have felt different in the past weeks - and that great new feeling is the brand new, lightweight, modern editor interface! In fact, you may have already heard or noticed that vBulletin 4.1.4 has a rather shiny and exciting new feature – the versatile CKEditor. Indeed, the old editor has been sent into retirement and replaced with a flexible, feature-rich and powerful editor. Equipped with proverbial sledgehammers, the vBulletin development team dove deep into the code-base and emerged victorious, ripping out the old editor which prevented future extendability, customizations and the much requested functionality such as auto-save. And so, without further ado, let me give you the top reasons why CKEditor rocks, its brief history and the overview of new functionality introduced in vBulletin 4.1.4.

• Complete, intuitive “What You See is What You Get” content editing capability for “WebKit” browsers.
• Paste from Word! You can now paste Word documents into the vBulletin editor; the CKEditor will try to preserve as much of Word text formatting as possible.
• High Performance and Accessibility. The CKEditor offers full accessibility functionality, its fast loading and has awesome AJAX capabilities.
• Auto-Save. Sick of losing posts when your browser crashes? Now you won’t have to worry, your content is safe.
• Future Development and Maintenance. CKEditor is described as “the text editor for the internet”, it is maintained by a dedicated team of developers and as they continue improving and offering great new features the vBulletin customers will reap great benefits.
• Customize! Pimp your editor! For more advanced users: you can customize your CKEditor’s appearance. The editor can be heavily customized from mild to wild to match your site’s look and feel. Additionally, the CKEditor can be modified right down to the core. Toolbar buttons can be modified to fit unique needs of your community. *This will get some additional attention in sub-sequent releases and is currently for advanced users.
• Popularity. CKEditor is used by many top-brand companies, including IBM, Adobe, Oracle, and drum roll, vBulletin!

Brief History of CKEditor:

The following section has been gracefully borrowed from the CKEditor.com’s own website. I would like to note one rather entertaining fun fact, however. The original name of the editor was “FCK”, but due to a rather unfortunate resemblance to a similar word (use your imagination) – the editor was renamed to simply CK.

FCKeditor has been around for more than six years. Since 2003 it has built a strong user community becoming the most used editor in the market, accumulating more than 3.5 million downloads. In 2009, we decided to rename the editor, bringing to light the next generation of the software: CKEditor 3.0.

CKEditor inherits the quality and strong features people were used to finding in FCKeditor, in a much more modern product, added by dozens of new benefits, like accessibility and ultimate performance.

Auto-Save in vBulletin 4.1.4:

Besides the shiny buttons and smoother overall functionality, the biggest new feature added in the initial release of the updated editor in vBulletin 4.1.4 is the ability to “Auto-Save” content. What does this mean, exactly? Content auto-save is like an emergency parachute – it automatically saves your content so that it can be restored in the event that things go very wrong.

Imagine this scenario. You’ve sat down to write a blog entry or a really long reply to a thread. Like a mad composer, you are banging away on the keyboard typing away furiously; your words and ideas are flowing freely into the editor. In an unfortunate twist of cruel fate your foot kicks the power outlet and unplugs your computer. Your computer shuts down as you begin to panic – the panic slowly transforming into agonizing rage. Well, there is good news! The new CKEditor automatically backs up your work every 30 seconds (this is adjustable). You curse the skies, successfully reboot your computer and navigate back to the page where you were writing the content, click the “Restore Auto-Save” button and magically – your masterpiece is now restored. Nothing has been lost!

This magic auto-save functionality applies to the editor in general and is available in all vBulletin sections, including CMS, Forums and Blogs.

Improved, Intuitive User Interface

The new editor makes it easier to format content nicely and create pretty articles and posts. After all, CKEditor is a true “what you see is what you get” editor. You can adjust image sizes, create thumbnails, add and format table data, align paragraphs of text as you wish and in general have a much better time creating visually and aesthetically pleasing content.

Besides a streamlined and generally improved user interface, the new editor comes with a lot of little details that will make the user experience more enjoyable. For example, when creating a quick reply users are now able to click the similes button to enhance their quick-reply post.

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