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Updated TinyMCE 3 in Moodle 1.9
Article published on:17 July 2009, 11:05
Hello again!
The Google Summer of Code midterm evaluations passed without any problems for me, yay!
I have began work on integrating PaintWeb into Moodle. I will integrate my project into the stable Moodle 1.9 branch and into the upcoming Moodle 2.0 release.
Moodle 1.9 has a very old TinyMCE release (version 2.0) which is not used by default - the even older HTMLArea is still used. Both do not work in Opera and Google Chrome. For this reason Martin Langhoff, my mentor, and other Moodle community members have worked on patches to switch to the modern TinyMCE 3 editor. A clean port of TinyMCE 3 to Moodle 1.9 is available on the Moodle forums.
The clean port is quite well done, but again, it was "outdated", being from october 2008.
For PaintWeb I took the work Martin did and updated it to the latest Moodle 1.9 stable branch, the latest TinyMCE 3 version, and made additional fixes. One fix was to make the editor show up in Opera, Safari and Chrome, and another fix was for the script which converts TinyMCE language files to Moodle language files.
PaintWeb integration into Moodle 1.9 will come as a patch on top of the TinyMCE 3 patch. Currently I got PaintWeb loading fine in TinyMCE, inside Moodle. More work is needed to get file save working. For PaintWeb I did some assorted fixes for the Makefile, for the overall keyboard accessibility, for multi-language support, and I did improvements to the TinyMCE plugin.
You can download the updated TinyMCE 3 patch for Moodle 1.9. The package includes usage instructions.
In other related news, Opera Software has published the second part of the article I wrote about keyboard accessiblity in Web applications. This article describes the inner workings of the MouseKeys extension for PaintWeb. Make sure you checkout the updated and improved source code of the MouseKeys extension in the PaintWeb code tree.
Have fun until the next time!