tinymce_hammer¶ ↑

See the plugin website for guides/tutorials: tinymcehammer.lanalot.com/

tinymce_hammer makes its easy to user the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor inside a Ruby On Rails (2.3/3+) application. What it does:

• Easy to use, two-step installation and you are ready to go. Form helpers are provided for most common cases.

• Flexible, need to lazy load TinyMCE w/javascript? Need two different editors on the same page? Want to user your own form helpers? No problem.

• Fast, TinyMCE requests lots of .js files for the most basic of editor configurations. It does all this over XMLHttpRequest. tinymce_hammer eliminates this by combining all required library files (plugins, themes, languages, etc) into one javascript file.

Installation¶ ↑

1. Download and this plugin and copy to vendor/plugins/tinymce_hammer

2. Run the following generator:

   [RAILS 2.3+] script/generate tinymce_installation
   [RAILS 3+] rails g tinymce_installation

   This will install TinyMCE to:

   RAILS_ROOT/public/javascript/tiny_mce
   

   If you need a different install path for TinyMCE see the configuration section below for instructions on changing the default path.

Upgrading¶ ↑

Uprade the plugin and re-run the installation generator.

Basic Usage¶ ↑

The easiest way to use tinymce_hammer involves 2 steps:

1. Call the follow function in your layout/template. It can go anywhere really, but inside the head tags is prefered:

   <%= init_tinymce_hammer_if_required %>

2. Use one of the following 3 methods to add a tinymce enabled textarea tag to your page.

Example 1: tinymce_tag (form tag helper)¶ ↑

This is your basic drop-in replacement for text_area_tag:

<%= tinymce_tag('comment[body]', 'Your comment goes here ...') %>

Example 2: tinymce (form helper)¶ ↑

This is just like the text_area helper, it assumes there is an instance variable, and if found will pull data from that to populate the field with.

<%= tinymce(:comment, :body) %>

Example 3: tinymce (form builder helper)¶ ↑

<%- form_for @comment do |form| -%>
  <%= form.label :body %>
  <%= form.tinymce :body %>
<% end %>

Deployment¶ ↑

Tinymce defaults to caching the combined js file using ActionController’s caches_page method. This causes problems in certain deployed environments (like Heroku) where you can not write to disk, or to web servers that don’t pass requests for js files through. To avoid this issue run the following rake task:

rake tinymce:cache_js

You can commit the js file that builds to your repository and that should avoid deploy time issues. You could also add that to a capistrano recipe.

Advanced Usage¶ ↑

The basic examples above get a TinyMCE editor up and running quickly. You might have more specific needs that the basic approach doesn’t fill. You might:

• want to lazy load TinyMCE dynamically after page load

• only want the combined javascript TinyMCE file provided by tinymce_hammer

• require multiple editors on the same page that are configured differently

• need to register javascript callbacks with TinyMCE

In all of the above cases its best to load the combined JS file and call the tinyMCE.init() javascript function yourself. I’ll leave that up to you how and when. The url to the combine file is:

/javascripts/tinymce_hammer.js

It works great to lazy load (I personally use LazyLoad from wonko.com/post/painless_javascript_lazy_loading_with_lazyload).

Configuration¶ ↑

tinymce_hammer has five configuration options. Its best to place them in an intializer (like config/initializer/tinymce_hammer.rb). Here they are with their default values:

• Tinymce::Hammer.install_path

  '/javascripts/tiny_mce'
  

• Tinymce::Hammer.plugins

  ['paste']
  

• Tinymce::Hammer.languages

  ['en']
  

• Tinymce::Hammer.themes

  ['advanced']
  

• Tinymce::Hammer.init

  [
    [:paste_convert_headers_to_strong, true],
    [:paste_convert_middot_lists, true],
    [:paste_remove_spans, true],
    [:paste_remove_styles, true],
    [:paste_strip_class_attributes, true],
    [:theme, 'advanced'],
    [:theme_advanced_toolbar_align, 'left'],
    [:theme_advanced_toolbar_location, 'top'],
    [:theme_advanced_buttons1, 'undo,redo,cut,copy,paste,pastetext,|,bold,italic,strikethrough,blockquote,charmap,bullist,numlist,removeformat,|,link,unlink,image,|,cleanup,code'],
    [:theme_advanced_buttons2, ''],
    [:theme_advanced_buttons3, ''],
    [:valid_elements, "a[href|title],blockquote[cite],br,caption,cite,code,dl,dt,dd,em,i,img[src|alt|title|width|height|align],li,ol,p,pre,q[cite],small,strike,strong/b,sub,sup,u,ul"],
  ]
  

NOTE: install_path is the path inside public to your TinyMCE installation.

NOTE: please don’t set the mode option for the init. This is managed by tinymce_hammer. If this doesn’t work for your, try the advanced usage.

Sample Configuration¶ ↑

Tinymce::Hammer.install_path = '/javascripts/lib/tiny_mce'

Tinymce::Hammer.plugins = %w(safari table paste tabfocus)

Tinymce::Hammer.init = [
  [:paste_convert_headers_to_strong, true],
  [:paste_convert_middot_lists, true],
  [:paste_remove_spans, true],
  [:paste_remove_styles, true],
  [:paste_strip_class_attributes, true],
  [:theme, 'advanced'],
  [:theme_advanced_toolbar_align, 'left'],
  [:theme_advanced_toolbar_location, 'top'],
  [:theme_advanced_buttons1, 'undo,redo,cut,copy,paste,pastetext,|,bold,italic,strikethrough,blockquote,charmap,bullist,numlist,removeformat,|,link,unlink,image,|,cleanup,code'],
  [:theme_advanced_buttons2, ''],
  [:theme_advanced_buttons3, ''],
  [:valid_elements, "a[href|title],blockquote[cite],br,caption,cite,code,dl,dt,dd,em,i,img[src|alt|title|width|height|align],li,ol,p,pre,q[cite],small,strike,strong/b,sub,sup,u,ul"],
]

Questions¶ ↑

The best way to get help is to post to the mailing list (google group).

http://groups.google.com/group/tinymce_hammer/topics