WCTeditor

A super-simple text editor for modern browsers. Supports:

• bold
• italic
• underline
• numbered lists
• bulleted lists
• links
• stripping html (except line breaks/paragraphs)
• spell-check via callback

Tested so far and works ok in:

• FF 3.6
• Chrome 8
• Safari 5
• Opera 11
• IE 7+
• NOT mobile WebKit

Usage

Requires jQuery and the jQuery templates plugin (there's also a version with no template dependency). Get those and then apply the WCTeditor plugin to a textarea with some options:

$("#myTextArea").WCTeditor({
	showNumList: true,
	showBullList: true,
	pathToPlugin:"../"
});

Yay! Done.

Options

showBold

boolean: Whether or not you'd like the bold button to be shown. On by default.

showItalic

boolean: Whether or not you'd like the italicize button to be shown. On by default.

showUnderline

boolean: Whether or not you'd like the underline button to be shown.

showNumList

boolean: Whether or not you'd like the ordered list button to be shown.

showBullList

boolean: Whether or not you'd like the unordered list button to be shown.

showLink

boolean: Whether or not you'd like the link button to be shown. On by default.

showStripHtml

boolean: Whether or not you'd like the strip/clean up HTML button to be shown.

showSpellCheck

boolean: Whether or not you'd like the spellcheck button to be shown.

userClasses

array of strings: CSS class(es) you'd like to have applied to the div that wraps the editor.

defaultText

string: Text you want the editor to display with, if different than what's in your textarea.

showCharCount

boolean: Whether or not you'd like to show a character counter. See below for where to change the way the character counter works.

charCountTmpl

string: The template for your character counter. This can be just text or some HTML, but you need to insert "{{html chars}}" where you want the count to actually appear.

maxLength

integer: The maximum length of the user's input, including HTML, if different than the maxlength of your textarea.

spellcheckUrl

string: Path to the spellchecking service you'd like to call.

pathToPlugin

string: Location of this plugin (i.e., location of WCTeditor.js) relative to the file it's being implemented in.

theme

string: A directory name. The plugin will look for a stylesheet at [pathToPlugin]/themes/[theme]/WCTeditor.css

placeholderText

string: Helpful text that will display within the editor while it is empty, if defaultText is not set and the textarea is empty.

textarea

element: A reference to the textarea the editor is replacing.

Functions

You may want to override some of these to change the default functionality.

init

Renders the editor and sets up its event handlers.

remove

Removes the editor and shows the textarea again.

reset

Removes all text and markup from the editor and its corresponding textarea.

getRange

Utility function: gets the current selection.

setSelection

args: range (the range to select)

Utility function: sets the current selection.

supportsContentEditable

Utility function: uses a combo of feature detection and UA-sniffing to determine whether the editor will work.

applyFormatting

args: type (the designMode command)

Applies the basic designMode commands.

updateTextarea

Pushes changes to the editor to your textarea, then calls updateCharCount if it's enabled.

updateCharCount

Updates the character count. Counts down from your specified maximum, then goes to negative. Assigns the CSS class "tooLong" to the count only once it goes negative.

updateButtons

Updates the state of the formatting buttons depending on the cursor location.

setLink

args: leftPosition (left position of formatting button)

Displays the interface to set a URL and wires up the button in that interface to update the editor markup.

stripHTML

args: html (the editor's current innerHTML)

Removes all markup except paragraphs and line breaks.

stripHTMLComments

Removes HTML comments from content pasted into the editor.

spellcheck

IE-only implementation, because other browsers include spellcheck. Sends the text within the editor to the service specified by the spellcheckUrl property, and expects an array of results in the format:

{originalWord: string, suggestions: []}

Wraps each misspelling in a font tag, and wires up an event handler to display a small window with the suggestions and an option to ignore the misspelling. Clicking a suggestion replaces the misspelling and removes the font tag, clicking ignore simply removes the font tag.

handle

args: eventName (the name of the pseudo-event - see next section), callback (function to execute when the event occurs)

The "subscribe" portion of the editor's mini-pub/sub.

Events

These get "fired" when certain functions are run.

wcte.loaded

Fired after the editor is rendered and its event handlers have been wired up.

wcte.beforeRemove

Fired when the editor is about to be removed from the page.

License

WTFPL