📅 News and updates: January 17, 2017

[Reinmar]

It's the first News and Updates issue since the end of November which closed iteration 5.

Iteration 6 triggered various infrastructure topics which absorbed us so much that we decided to extend this iteration until the end of January. This could be a nice way of saying that we have a delay ;), but the changes that we have made and on which we are still working are really significant and could only be done before we release CKEditor 5 and could not be split into multiple iterations. Let's start from the beginning.

Project infrastructure

We are getting closer and closer to the final release, so it is high time to re-evaluate architectural decisions which we have taken earlier. This is especially important for the project infrastructure because all the software (which includes the official packages as well as 3rd party ones) is built upon it. Some of the topics which we (re)opened were:

• whether we want to keep the multi-repo architecture,
• how will we organise the issues,
• how are we going to implement translations,
• and finally, how are we going to release CKEditor packages?

However, the two most influential issues turned out to be a question whether we need the compilation step and how to switch to scoped packages and versioned dependencies.

Compilation was a building step performed before bundling CKEditor which was meant to encapsulate all CKEditor-specific tasks so CKEditor could be later bundled using any bundler of one's choice. This was a noble idea but turned to be really inconvenient and complicate things instead of simplifying them. We decided to get rid of the compilation step by aligning our building process as much as possible to the "JS standard(s)" (like there is only one) and encapsulate the remaining things (such as language files compilation) in plugins prepared for existing bundlers.

Even now, the change required a lot of work, but we have already seen that it makes it a lot easier to integrate building CKEditor with your workflow.

After settling on the building without compilation, we turned our faces towards switching to scoped packages and versioned dependencies. So far, we have been using npm to install dependencies from GitHub by using GitHub URLs in package.json. We need to stop doing this and use proper versioned dependencies. We also want to have all the official packages scoped in @ckeditor. This meant that we needed to review all our existing dev tools. We took that chance and proposed a simple (and generic) tool called mgit2. It allows to manage multi-repo projects and together with Lerna make a perfect pair for multi-repo multi-package projects.

We are now working on integrating mgit2 into our Travis setup. Once this is done, CKEditor 5 will be super easy to integrate, work with and develop.

Other changes

After this lengthy introduction about infrastructure I will just list some of the other things that we worked on because, besides infrastructure, we are also constantly pushing forward features and improvements for CKEditor 5 itself.

• Translation service (already mentioned), is under development.
• Release tools are under development. They include automatic changelog generation, automated semantic version bumping (based on the changelog) and synchronising dependency versions.
• Keyboard support for widgets was improved (also https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5-engine/issues/696).
• Tooltips were added to buttons.
• The paragraph feature's converter behaves like a wildcard now, which is important for handling pasting content that contains markup with no existing converters.
• Image styles (a.k.a. alignment) were implemented.
• Editor and plugin events for initialisation steps were added.
• Rect utils were extracted from BalloonPanelView to enable code reuse.
• Delta transformation utils were implemented in order to allow processing other users changes.
• A wireframe theme was extracted from the Lark theme in order to allow building your own themes in an easier way.
• And many bugs were fixed :)