To the Confluence team re the plugins in the upcoming TinyMCE 4.0 integration

[David Ainsburg]

Hi, per release notes the Confluence team is working on integrating TinyMCE 4.0 in 6.8 or 7.0 worst case. (https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/preparing-for-confluence-6-8-943980256.html)

Sweet! We're looking forward to the new editor. But we have a couple of questions about the TinyMCE plugins which will come along and wanted to put them into the community stream.

1. Will any of the standard plugins which ship with TMCE 4.0 be disabled in the Confluence release? We are interested in the Spellcheck plugin as a priority for our users.

2. Will the sample code for adding plugins to TMCE 4.0 be made available on or before release? We will probably upgrade to Spellcheck Pro (licensing it from Moxiecode) and Atlassian has the current integration code samples in its documentation. Because it requires server restarts, we'll need correct code in hand before we get the integration going.

Thanks for any help, and if anyone else has interest in this topic, please feel free to expand on it! 

Best regards,

David

[Jiri Hronik]

The TinyMCE upgrade mostly concentrates on improving the editing experience itself and we won't be introducing any new standard plugins except those already available before. TinyMCE plugins using 3.x API should in most cases still work even in 4.x as we'll provide compat3x plugin.
Current examples on how to add an editor plugin will keep working, with one additional feature: you can load particular resources only in 3.x editor or 4.x editor if you wish to. Notice the context in this example:

<web-resource key="editor-plugin" name="Example editor plugin">
    <!-- This will load in the editor regardless of TinyMcE version -->
    <resource type="download" name="plugin.js" location="plugin.js" />
    <context>editor</context>
</web-resource>

<web-resource key="editor-plugin-3x" name="Example editor plugin 3.x">
    <!-- This will only load for TinyMcE 3.x -->
    <resource type="download" name="plugin3x.js" location="extras-for-3x.js" />
    <context>editor-v3</context>
</web-resource>

<web-resource key="editor-plugin-4x" name="Example editor plugin 4.x">
    <!-- This will only load for TinyMcE 4.x -->
    <resource type="download" name="plugin4x.js" location="extras-for-4x.js" />
    <context>editor-v4</context>
</web-resource>

To your second question, please note that in case the spellchecker modifies DOM of the edited document like the Ephox Spell checker plugin does, this change will be synchronised between all collaborators in case Collaborative editing is enabled in Confluence.

[David Ainsburg]

Thanks for your reply Jim! Just to clarify, per Moxiecode's documentation, TinyMCE 4.0 comes with more plugins standard than TinyMCE 3.x, including a spellchecker and the potential to upgrade to an even better one.

So when you say " we won't be introducing any new standard plugins except those already available before", are you saying you'll be removing some 4.0 plugins so that there's no change to the plugin suite that came with 3.x? And we'd have to re-add them manually if we wanted them?

This question really impacts us as we're an end-user of Atlassian products, not a developer partner. So we need a clear list of what we will get out of the box as making code changes is a significant effort for us.

Thanks for your help!

[Jiri Hronik]

That is correct. TinyMCE indeed provides standard plugins, however Confluence has never used them all and on the other hand added many custom ones designed specifically for Confluence. Some of the standard ones wouldn't be compatible with Confluence out of the box, e.g. Spell Checker plugin as it requires a spell checking backend service and may also need some additional configuration in order to support Collaborative editing. This can be achieved via a plugin.

Please note that developing a custom spell checker is not the only option, there are already spell checker plugins in the Marketplace, and most browsers provide such functionality too.

[David Ainsburg]

Thank you for your response Jiri. We didn't know those facts about how Confluence integrates TinyMCE and plugins.

About our options, a centralized spellchecker is the best one for us (and probably most businesses ime). We need to have everyone using the same dictionary when they create Confluence content so specialized terms and acronyms do not show up as misspellings for everyone every time they write something. 

We reviewed the ones on the Marketplace and they are not adequate to our needs, hence our interest in the one in TinyMCE 4.0. FYI that one is standalone and can have additional dictionaries added through a server-side process, so it at least meets our minimum requirements for our environment (distributed contributions in a trusted environment in which no external services are allowed). 

I hope you reconsider keeping the Spellcheck plugin in the upcoming Confluence release! We really do not see a better standalone one available for Confluence at this time.