When it comes to developing and maintaining rich text editors it’s important to never be static or complacent. We need to continue to have a focus on innovation, best practices, and user experience. That’s why, with our release of TinyMCE 5.9 and TinyMCE 5.10, we are announcing the future deprecation of four plugins.
The decision wasn’t easy, but after much research and investigation, we determined that the features and plugins we’re deprecating are better served through different channels, or are legacy solutions that have been superseded by a newer plugin feature.
These features and plugins will continue to be supported within the TinyMCE 5 series, with changes expected to take effect in the soon to be announced TinyMCE 6 release.
Deprecated WYSIWYG open source plugins
The following four open source plugins are announced for upcoming deprecation. An additional open source plugin previously announced as deprecated is fast approaching the scheduled removal date.
Deprecated as of TinyMCE 5.9 and TinyMCE 5.10
The following four plugins are set up for deprecation:
BBcode plugin
The BBCode – Bulletin Board Code – editor allowed using BBCode as an input and output format instead of HTML This format continues to age, and the corresponding plugin is being deprecated because very few projects and applications use BBCode today.
Legacy Output plugin
The Legacy Output plugin – which changes the TinyMCE HTML output into legacy HTML3 elements – is being deprecated because of the aging HTML3 format. Browsers no longer support older HTML syntax, and introducing them into the TinyMCE editor can cause web applications to produce errors or to break.
Full Page plugin
Considering the limited use cases, continued development on the Full Page plugin and lower usage of this particular feature, it is therefore being deprecated.
Spell Checker plugin
The free Spell Checker plugin was scheduled to be deprecated in the TinyMCE 5.4 release, and the plugin will be removed in the upcoming TinyMCE 6.0 release. A reminder: this includes both the editor plugin and the PHP backend program. Any projects making use of the free Spell Checker plugin should look at their configuration and plan for a change in spell checking capabilities.
Forking the deprecated plugins
If you’re interested in continuing to work on these plugins yourself, you can head to the plugin source code in the TinyMCE monorepo and create a fork of the plugin code. These are the locations of the deprecated plugins:
We have an active community of open source developers who can provide more guidance on how they went forking plugins and developing their own projects. Check on some of the feature requests while visiting the Github repositories.
Changes to forced_root_block
This configuration option, one of our content filtering options, is not being deprecated in TinyMCE 6.0, but the way it’s configured is changing. The purpose of the forced_root_block option is to force wrap any non-block elements or text nodes into a block element.
This option will no longer accept a false value or an empty string when configuring. You must configure a specific block element for the option to wrap up text nodes on a page from TinyMCE 6.0 onwards. We’re changing the behaviour of this option as it blocks editor functions and generates non-semantic HTML.
Rich text editor language configuration changes
The TinyMCE 5.9 release introduces improved language configuration. As a result the spellchecker_select_languages option has been superseded by the content_langs option.
The select languages option allows configuration of a list of languages you can select in a drop down menu from the toolbar above the WYSIWYG. The content_langs option expands on this ability, by introducing the ability to configure language codes following the Internet Engineering Task Force (IEFT) standards.
This standard is the best practice in languages programming, and is a comprehensive list of languages and language subtypes.
Along with these changes is the deprecation of the open source Spell Checker plugin. While the open source Spell Checker plugin will be deprecated, If you're using browser spell checking, this will still be supported in TinyMCE version 6.0. Activate it with the browser_spellcheck: true option.
Have feedback? Let us know!
You can read about the TinyMCE 5.9 release (which includes the new RTC plugin), and the TinyMCE list of upcoming changes, and the improvements made to the TinyMCE language capabilities.
Were any of these plugins helping you in your work? Have any additional thoughts or concerns about this announcement? We want to hear from you. Please reach out to us directly at team@tiny.cloud to let us know your thoughts.
You can also join our new GitHub disucssions area.
Your feedback helps to make TinyMCE a powerful and flexible open source rich text editor.
