📅 News and updates: July 31, 2017

[Reinmar]

It's been over 2 months since the last release, so it is high time for a small update.

We planned to release 1.0.0 alpha around June, but we knew that to make it really count we will need the documentation. That, in turn, meant that we needed to clean up a few critical places in the API, to not write the documentation twice. As soon as we started that, more topics appeared and here we are, nearly 2 months later, with 240 closed tickets and something which starts to look as a proper documentation.

Let's make a quick go through what we have.

Documentation

We began publishing nightly builds of CKEditor 5 documentation. The pieces which may be useful already are the API docs, builds documentation and the lovely search powered by Algolia:

The results themselves are not yet super readable but we will be working on that (basically, we need to improve Algolia configuration).

The plan is to work on the missing guides (mainly, framework and examples) and complete the existing ones. At the same time, we will also be improving the UX/UI of the documentation.

Gitter

We have set up a Gitter channel for CKEditor 5. There is also a short explanation on how we think it should be used by all of us.

Stabilization

The current milestone already contains 115 bug fixes and this number is growing fast. The changes affect all features, from the engine's renderer to how the image balloon's position is updated when the document changes.

The most important change of all was the history and OT refactoring which has a huge impact on how the undo works and on the stability of collaboration. We understood that shortcuts that we took in the past blocked correct behavior of selective undo which is important in cases like asynchronous image upload and collaborative editing (both require selective undo). We decided that we need to rewrite that feature now to be sure that we did not make other important mistakes when designing our approach to the Operational Transformation algorithms. Fortunately, @scofalik handled that refactoring very well and for a month we are using the new code. The downside is that undoing is a lot more demanding now and any tiny little issue in the OT algorithms comes up so we have some regressions (which we are actively fixing). The upside is that this forces us to verify and polish OT-related scenarios which might otherwise stay invisible.

Other changes

Our biggest focus is on bug fixes, so there are no new big features. Still, we made many improvements.

• The command API was redesigned to make command implementation simpler.
• The read-only mode was introduced.
• We switched to ESLint.
• We introduced PluginInterface which makes creating simple plugins easier.
• We added responsive images support.
• The SVG icons were cleaned which resulted in saving 20kb.
• We introduced configurable toolbar offsets for better integration with various websites.
• Tooltips do not use :after or :before anymore which also fixed text blurring in Chrome.

What's next?

In August we will continue to work on documentation and bug fixes. I think that around the middle of August we will reevaluate the progress and see if we are going to release an intermediate 0.11.0 (which would happen around mid August) or wait a few more weeks for a proper 1.0.0 alpha.

However, we feel that releasing 1.0.0 will be only a pleasant but mostly symbolic moment. The API will not stabilize for a couple of months anyway, so bumping a version number to 1.0.0 even now would not change much. What matters at this stage are documentation and stability and we simply take care of this.

PS. Thanks for all the questions and feedback on various channels and for the kind words that we hear. We look forward to allowing you to really enjoy CKEditor 5 :).

[rjcorwin]

*July 31, 2017 :)

[Reinmar]

Thanks! The two previous posts were also dated incorrectly :D.