I've seen it and it looks great. I'll try to study up on what they've
done. I'd love it if I could simply import their code, however, I fear
the time and effort it would take to integrate it into the rest of our
code. I think this is one of those places where it would be great to
have more volunteers to come into our project. If someone else wanted
to integrate fckeditor into our code, that would be awesome. As it is,
I feel that I don't have the time, and that for a few simple
select/replace commands, its quicker for me to write the code myself.
After all, the basic text editing features that we now have I'll
probably be done debugging by Friday, whereas if I tried to import
fckeditor, I'd probably be lucky if I could get done reading the
documentation by Friday.
I have tried importing other open source packages before, and it has
rarely worked out for me. Every package makes assumptions about how the
data should be formatted in the end, what names should be given to form
inputs, how variables should be input to the server and is the backend
language PHP or ASP or JSP? Every package takes time to think through
and integrate. The only code that I've managed to import so far is code
that stands alone or has very simple and clear input expectations:
Matt Bean's function for pinging
www.weblogs.com (PHP)
Paul Schrieber's email class (PHP)
Costin Breveneaua's class for MySql (PHP)
Zurab Davitiani's XML class (PHP)
All of these are pretty much single purpose, stand-alone packages.
Importing fckeditor is automatically more complicated than that, since
I'd have to control the form inputs to make sure they have the names
the PHP code expects before inputting the results to the database. And
I'd have questions like, am I responsible for validating the form
input, or does fckeditor do that?
So I'd say it is not easy to import a big package like that. However, I
only say this because I am so stretched for time. Again, if another
volunteer joined up who wanted to integrate it into our software, I'd
say that was awesome.
In the meantime, I need to figure out how to make my text editing
functions work on a Mac. So I'll take a look to see what they did to
make it work.