Frederico Knabben

It all started back in 2014, when the CKSource team gathered together in our usual meetups. Something really special was up for discussion: a brainstorm about the future of CKEditor. That meeting seeded the ideas and foundation for the amazing products we made available since then, including CKEditor 5 and Collaboration.

In this article I give a quick overview of the problem we aim to solve, the solutions we developed for that purpose and how to approach collaborative editing in your application.

The heart of the new CKEditor Ecosystem is undoubtedly our brand new editor, CKEditor 5. It’s not simply the next major version of one the most popular rich text editors out there. It’s the next chapter on what web text editors are, how they should be used and what possibilities they bring.

’It all started in 2003. The decision of bringing my pet project into the open — to an environment I was still unfamiliar with. In a period when Open Source Software wasn’t yet a fashionable thing to do in order to show that you’re cool.’

’What features should a rich text editor have? Should bold produce the ’strong’ or the ’b’ HTML tag? Should underline be included? What about formatting features like font size or color?

’Last year I’ve introduced some details about CKEditor 5, our new content editing platform, which will reach the market in 2016. Since then, we’ve made very good progress with its development. We’re almost finalizing the code for the basic infrastructure that will support the editor’s core.
There is one aspect though that has not been emphasized enough so far  -  the fact that (since the very beginning) we have been designing CKEditor 5 in the open, so anyone can jump in to help us or to simply share their opinion.’

CKEditor has made a long way in more than 12 years of its existence. During this time, it has been greatly improved in many aspects, becoming a rock-solid solution for web applications, reaching 15 million downloads recently.
The Web itself changed during these years. New standards emerged together with new ways of consuming and sharing information. A much stronger understanding about the value of web content has developed, for the benefit of the present and the future of the world. JavaScript finally showed its power in the everyday life of people and the web technology evolved to become the mandatory option for modern software.

This week we crossed an amazing milestone reaching 15 million downloads of CKEditor historically (check the website footer). In 2014 alone we had 3 million downloads! Impressive!

On April 1st we posted an article about CKEditor closing its source code. This was obviously an April Fools joke, or more precisely an opportunity to use satire to remind the community of our Open Source position. CKEditor is not going commercial and has no intention of ever doing so. CKSource is also not cooperating with any government agency!

It’s official! CKEditor is 10 years old! Exactly a decade ago I endeavored on a JavaScript project for Internet Explorer 6 (WAT!) bearing my initials (I was young and crazy). The result was an Open Source WYSIWYG editor called FCKeditor, later CKEditor (find the easter egg on our home page!). Time sure flew by… Today we are celebrating the editor’s 10th anniversary!

With the release of CKEditor 3.2, a year ago, we have re-launched our accessibility strategy, making it based on the WAI-ARIA standards. This is something we have been working on for several months in strict cooperation with IBM, satisfying their high level of accessibility requirements. It certainly took our accessibility support, already significant in previous releases, to a much higher level, allowing us to support the W3C WCAG 2.0 and Section 508 guidelines.

Amazing numbers are coming out of our 2010 summary. Our company is growing fast , which simply reflects the success of our projects. Among the ways to measure this success one important factor deserves a special mention: the number of direct downloads.