In past versions of Cerberus Helpdesk we offered an embedded HTML editor to create rich knowledgebase content.  Many people have commented about how a graphical editor is nowhere to be found in Cerb4.

Here’s our rationale for dropping it — it’s 2008.  We all need to get over the idea that it’s each web application’s duty to bring their own spellchecker and HTML Editor to the party.  Those are tools the platform should be providing — and the platform is the web browser.  This isn’t something that upsets the balance of nature — while we’re taking a stand, you’re still able to paste HTML into the edit box directly from your favorite HTML editor (Nvu, Dreamweaver, Arachnophilia, vim, TextMate — NotePad).

In Cerb3, the solution wasn’t perfect either.  TinyMCE (the HTML Editor of choice at the time) took up 8MB of the project’s 31MB (26%).  It required dozens of Javascript and graphical resources to be downloaded and cached.  It didn’t work with some browsers — and when it did work, some people would say, “But XYZ editor is so much better!”

In designing Cerb4, we stuck to the spirit of simplicity.  It made a lot more sense to us to have people use whatever HTML editor they preferred.

That doesn’t mean things have to be inconvenient:

If you’re using Firefox, there’s a great, free extension available that provides a browser-side HTML editor for entering content into any textbox.  It’s called Write Area and you can find it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6147

One you install the extension and restart Firefox, you can right-click in any textarea and choose “Edit in Write Area”.  A full-featured HTML editor will pop-up and you can create or modify a document.  Once you save, the HTML source will be written to your textbox (in Cerb4′s case, the knowledgebase content area).

Here’s a screenshot of it in action (click to zoom):

Enjoy!

-Jeff@WGM