Configure the Rich Text Editor

The Rich Text Editor (RTE) provides authors with a wide range of functionality to edit text content. Icons, selection boxes, toolbar, and menus are provided for a WYSIWYG text-editing experience. Administrators configure the RTE to enable, disable, and extend the features available in the authoring components. See how authors use RTE for authoring web content.

The RTE concepts and steps required to configure it are listed below.

Understand the user interface available to authors

The RTE interface offers a responsive design for authoring environment. The interface is designed for use on touch and desktop devices.

Figure: Rich Text Editor toolbar with all the available options enabled.

The toolbar provides the options for the WYSIWYG authoring experience. Experience Manager administrators can configure the options available in the toolbar on the interface. A comprehensive set of editing options are available by default in Experience Manager. Developers can customize Experience Manager to add more editing options.

Various modes of editing

Authors can create and edit textual content in Experience Manager using the different modes of components. The toolbar options for authoring and formatting content and the user experience of RTE-enabled components in different editing mode varies based on RTE configurations.

Inline editing

To edit the content within a page, open the content with a slow double-click . A compact toolbar with basic options is presented.

Figure: Inline editing with basic options in the toolbar.

Full-screen editing

Experience Manager components can be opened in full-screen view that hides the page content and occupies the available screen. Consider full-screen editing a detailed version of the inline editing as it offers the most editing options. It can be opened by clicking , from the compact toolbar when using the inline editing mode.

In the dialog full-screen mode, along with a detailed RTE toolbar, the options and components available in a dialog are also available. It is applicable only for a dialog that contains RTE alongside other components.

Figure: The detailed RTE toolbar when editing in full-screen mode.

Dialog editing

When a component is double-clicked a dialog box opens for editing the contents. The dialog box opens on top of the existing page. In some specific scenarios, the dialog opens as a pop-up window. For example, when a Text component is part of a column in a multicolumn page layout and the area available for the dialog is less.

Figure: Dialog editing mode.

About RTE plug-ins and the associated features

The functionality is made available via a series of plug-ins, each with:

• A features property that is,

  • Used to activate, or deactivate, basic functionality for that plug-in.
  • Configured using a standardized procedure.

• Where appropriate, more properties and options requiring specialized configuration.

Basic features of the RTE are activated, or deactivated, by the value of the features property on a node specific to the appropriate plug-in.

The following table lists the current plug-ins, showing:

• Plug-in IDs with a link to API documentation. ID is used as the node name when activating a plug-in.
• Permitted values for the features property.
• A description of the functionality provided by the plug-in.

Understand the configuration paths and locations

The mode of RTE editing and the interface that you provide for your authors decide the location for the configuration details when you are activating the RTE plug-ins. The locations are:

• Inline mode: cq:editConfig/cq:inplaceEditing.
• Full-screen mode: cq:editConfig/cq:inplaceEditing.
• Dialog mode: cq:dialog.
• Full-screen dialog mode: cq:dialog.

Configure the following properties that apply in Dialog editing mode:

• useFixedInlineToolbar: You can make the RTE toolbar fixed instead of floating. Set this Boolean property defined on the RTE node with sling:resourceType= cq/gui/components/authoring/dialog/richtext to True. When this property is set to True, the rich text editing is started on the foundation-contentloaded event. To prevent this, set the property customStart to True and trigger the rte-start event to start RTE editing. When this property is true, RTE does not start on clicking and this is the default behavior.

• customStart: Set this Boolean property defined on the RTE node to True, to control when to start RTE by triggering the event rte-start.

• rte-start: Trigger this event on the contenteditable-div of RTE, when to start editing RTE. It works only if customStart has been set to true.

When RTE is used in the touch-enabled dialog, set the property useFixedInlineToolbar to true to avoid issues.

Enable RTE functionalities by activating plug-ins

RTE functionalities are made available via a series of plug-ins, each with features property. You can configure the features property to enable or disable the various features of each plug-in.

For detailed configurations of the RTE plug-ins, see how to activate and configure the RTE plug-ins.

The Core Components text component lets template editors to configure many RTE plug-ins using the user interface as content policies, eliminating the need for technical configuration. Content policies can work with RTE UI configurations as described in this document. For more information, see create page templates and the Core Components developer documentation.

For reference purposes, the default Text components (delivered as part of a standard installation) can be found at:

• /libs/wcm/foundation/components/text
• /libs/foundation/components/text

To create your own text component, copy the above component instead of editing these components.

Configure RTE toolbar

Experience Manager lets you to configure the interface for the Rich Text Editor differently for the different editing modes. The default settings are provided below. You can override these defaults based on your requirements. You customize only the toolbar features that you want to provide to your authors. You need not specify all the toolbar configurations.

To configure the toolbar for dialogFullScreen, use the following sample configuration.

<uiSettings jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
  <cui jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
    <inline
      jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
      toolbar="[format#bold,format#italic,format#underline,#justify,#lists,links#modifylink,links#unlink,#paraformat]">
      <popovers jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
        <justify
          jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
          items="[justify#justifyleft,justify#justifycenter,justify#justifyright,justify#justifyjustify]"
          ref="justify"/>
        <lists
          jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
          items="[lists#unordered,lists#ordered,lists#outdent,lists#indent]"
          ref="lists"/>
        <paraformat
          jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
          items="paraformat:getFormats:paraformat-pulldown"
          ref="paraformat"/>
      </popovers>
    </inline>
    <dialogFullScreen
      jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
      toolbar="[format#bold,format#italic,format#underline,justify#justifyleft,justify#justifycenter,justify#justifyright,justify#justifyjustify,lists#unordered,lists#ordered,lists#outdent,lists#indent,links#modifylink,links#unlink,table#createoredit,#paraformat,image#imageProps]">
      <popovers jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
        <paraformat
          jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
          items="paraformat:getFormats:paraformat-pulldown"
          ref="paraformat"/>
      </popovers>
    </dialogFullScreen>
    <tableEditOptions
      jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
      toolbar="[table#insertcolumn-before,table#insertcolumn-after,table#removecolumn,-,table#insertrow-before,table#insertrow-after,table#removerow,-,table#mergecells-right,table#mergecells-down,table#mergecells,table#splitcell-horizontal,table#splitcell-vertical,-,table#selectrow,table#selectcolumn,-,table#ensureparagraph,-,table#modifytableandcell,table#removetable,-,undo#undo,undo#redo,-,table#exitTableEditing,-]">
    </tableEditOptions>
  </cui>
</uiSettings>

Different user interface settings are used for the inline mode and full-screen mode. The toolbar property specifies the option of the toolbar.

For example, if the option is itself a feature (for example, Bold), it is specified as PluginName#FeatureName (for example, links#modifylink).

If the option is a pop over (containing some features of a plug-in), it is specified as #PluginName (for example, #format).

Separators (|) between a group of option can be specified with -.

The pop-up node under inline or full-screen mode contains a list of the pop overs being used. Each child node under the popovers node is named after the plug-in (for example, format). It has a property ‘items’ containing a list of features of the plug-in (for example, format#bold).

RTE user interface settings and content policies

Administrators can control the RTE options using content policies, say instead of doing the configuration as described above. Content policies define the design properties of a component when used as part of an editable template. For example, if a text component that uses the RTE is used with an editable template, the content policy can define that the bold option be available and a few paragraph formatting options be available. Content policies are reusable and can be applied across multiple templates.

The available options in the RTE flow downstream from the user interface configurations to the content policies.

• User interface configuration settings define which options are available to the content policies.
• If the user interface configuration of the RTE removed or doesn’t enable an item, the content policy cannot configure it.
• An author has access to only such functionality as is made available by the user interface configurations and the content policies.

As an example, you can see the Text Core Component documentation.

Customize mapping between toolbar icons and commands

You can customize the mapping between Coral icons displayed on the RTE toolbar and the available commands. You cannot use any other icons besides Coral icons.

1. Create a node named icons under uiSettings/cui.

2. Create nodes for individual icons under it.

3. On each of the individual icon nodes, specify a Coral icon and a command to map to the icon.

Below is a sample snippet to map the command Bold to the Coral icon named textItalic.

<text jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured" sling:resourceType="cq/gui/components/authoring/dialog/richtext" name="./text" useFixedInlineToolbar="{Boolean}true">
    <rtePlugins jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
        <format jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured" features="bold,italic"/>
    </rtePlugins>
    <uiSettings jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
        <cui jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
            <inline jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
                toolbar="[format#bold,format#italic,format#underline,links#modifylink,links#unlink]">
            </inline>
            <icons jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured">
                <bold jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"
                    command="format#bold"
                    icon="textItalic"/>
            </icons>
        </cui>
    </uiSettings>
</text>

Known limitations

Experience Manager RTE capability has the following limitations:

• RTE capabilities are supported only in Experience Manager component dialogs. RTE is not supported on wizards or Foundation-forms.

• Experience Manager does not work on Hybrid devices.

• Do not name the RTE configuration node config. Otherwise, the RTE configuration takes effect for only the administrators and not for the users in the group content-author.

• RTE does not support embedding content in an inline frame or an iframe.

Best practices and tips

• For a floating dialog, enable only the plug-ins without a pop-up dialog. Plug-ins without pop-up are smaller in size and are most suitable for a floating dialog.
• Enable the plug-ins with larger pop-up, such as the Paste plug-in, only in the full-screen dialog mode or in full-screen mode. Plug-ins with large pop-up need more screen real-estate to provide a good authoring experience.
• If you are using custom plug-ins for CoralUI3 RTE, use rte.coralui3 library.

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