[xwiki-devs] [Proposal] Plan for replacing XWiki's GWT-based WYSIWYG editor with the CKEditor-based one

Hi everyone, I’d like to give everyone some heads up about the plan I discussed with Marius (who’s working on the new CKEditor integration) regarding the new CKEditor-based WYSIWYG. Goals: ====== * Replace the current GWT-based WYSIWYG editor with one based on CKEditor, see http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/CKEditor+Integration * Keep it as an extension so that it can be installed using the Extension Manager on XWiki versions 7.4.x. We need to introduce some UIXP to be able to replace the existing editor in the XWiki menus so we’ll need to commit that in 7.4.x (with x >= 2). * Make it possible to install the extension on XWiki versions 6.2.5+. However the installation will have some manual parts, to replace the GWT-based editor. Timeline: ========= * Before the 19th of Feb, a new version of the CKEditor integration will be released containing wiki page/attachment linking and image insertion features. At that point what will remain is: ** Support for editing macros ** Office importer (if needed) ** Configuration UI in the administration ** Add UIXP to integrate the CKEditor nicely into the platform (using extension points) ** Future: Add support for packaging CKEditor plugins as XWiki Extension. * The goal is to implement all these remaining features around when 8.1M1 is released (i.e. early April 2016), except maybe the Future part which could be done later on. * Starting 8.1M2, the goal would be to bundle the Extension in the distribution (default flavor) but to not make it the default yet. There would be some configuration option to select which WYSIWYG editor to use (GTW-based or CKEditor-based). * Starting 8.2, if all goes alright, we would set the CKEditor WYSIWYG to be the default (still with ability for admins to configure the editor they wish to use so they can continue to use the GWT-based one if they want that). * Starting 9.0, the idea would be to remove the GWT-editor and retire it to XWiki Contrib with instructions for advanced developers to build it and use it in XWiki should they still want to do that. However we won’t spend extra time to refactor it as an extension since that would spend too much time which we prefer to spend on improving the new WYSIWYG editor. WDYT? Thanks -Vincent PS: cc-ing the users list to let the XWiki users know about the plan ahead of time!