The story of TinyMCE started almost twenty years ago, and the 2024 chapter contains growth, change, and major platform adjustments. It was a pivotal year for our rich text editor, as we updated the app to create a better experience for teamwork and content creation inside the editor. We started the year with a clear mission: to deliver on your requests for better collaboration, content conversions, and educational features.
How TinyMCE evolved in 2024
Based on your feedback in the TinyMCE Roadmap we saw that you wanted:
- Collaboration: To work together with other people inside the rich text editor.
- Conversion: To share content between different apps without reformatting it.
- Education: To create richer educational content platforms for teachers and students.
So we set out in 2024 to make our RTE more collaborative, educational, and useful. How did we do it? Let’s dive in.
Collaboration
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and its influence on remote work, the need to communicate and work globally has become essential. We aren’t in a room talking out our software needs anymore; we’re thousands of miles away from one another commenting on the same document. Harmoniously working together is hard enough to accomplish in person. Remotely it’s an even bigger challenge.
TinyMCE tackled this challenge in 2024 by fostering a more team-oriented environment through the introduction of new features, and enhancement of features already in our ecosystem.
View the past with Revision History
Before Revision History, teams had no way to track versions over time and couldn’t easily monitor progress on multi-author content. Revision History provides a timeline of document changes, helping teams maintain content accuracy and accountability.
When someone created a new content version, and what changes made up that version, are now available to users with the feature enabled. Revision History’s customizable interface allows developers to use brand colors. Now when a teacher who uses a learning management system wants to see revisions on student papers inside the rich text editor, they can.
Leave feedback easily with Comments
Seeing the history of a work document is all well and good, but what if our users have something to say, too? We couldn’t introduce Revision History without its accomplice, the Comments.
Prior to the introduction of Comments back in TinyMCE 5.0, feedback was often messy and hard to follow. If your users had to leave their work to message coworkers with questions, it slowed down their productivity and took longer to complete a task. It’s a frustrating feeling to have to work to get necessary feedback.
This year we overhauled Comments, giving the feature a more intuitive user experience and adding the ability to see all comments at one time and introducing a comments-only mode.
If a single comment is good, threaded conversations of comments are even better. Asynchronous conversation is more important than ever in our remote work and education environments. Your content reviewers can leave comments for an author, and answer any questions the author may have for them, all organized inside the editor.
Notify peers with Mentions
Our next challenge? Make collaboration even stronger by connecting the Comments and Mentions together. We gave users the ability to tag each other inside Comments threads, so teachers, students, remote workers, developers, content creators, and e-commerce shopkeepers can all communicate with specific people in their feedback.
Instead of writing a comment and then having to notify the person about the remark or wait for them to check for comments themselves, your users can simply “@” tag others on their team. This means more time saved on distributed teams, document management systems, and education platforms.
With the introduction of Revision History and then enhancements made to Comments, and Mentions, we upgraded the collaboration experience inside the rich text editor, and enriched the possibilities of how people can work together.
Conversion
We all work in multiple apps every day, and so do our users. They could be on an internal application, then a document management system, and then again in a content management system. When it comes to working between many applications, we addressed some big pain points in 2024: Import and export Word documents, export to PDF, and Markdown support.
Working with MS Word
From Microsoft Word to the browser. Then, back to Word again, and probably again to the browser. We’ve all been there. To make things a little easier, we created the Import from Word and Export to Word features this year.
Bring in complex Word documents
Instead of being forced to flip between Word and the browser to correct formatting and information architecture, users can now simply import a Word document. Its original rich formatting will be brought into the rich text editor in moments.
Export rich content as Word
Just as it’s critical to import complex document content from Word, it’s critical to keep documents intact when users need to export to Word format. No one wants to do the same formatting work in multiple documents, both in the web app and in MS Word. To save users time and energy, we also added the Export to Word feature in 2024.
Stronger PDF creation
Users in a content management system, learning management system, or document management system need to export their content without worrying about formatting changes. The best way to preserve formatting is to export as a PDF, which can’t be edited by other users. We recognize the importance of being able to create a PDF in many different web applications, so this year we implemented our Export to PDF feature. Now, your app users can create their content and preserve it before they send the document on its way.
Math Equations
Better collaboration between people and better compatibility between apps are both helpful, but we wanted to go farther this year. We knew that proper formatting for complex mathematical equations was next, and that it was needed for more than just education. Financial institutions, scientific organizations, and professional publication systems also need to use complicated math expressions. So in 2024 we created the Math Equations feature, which lets users create in LaTeX and MathML right inside the editor.
No more worrying about how to share the details of the financial analysis report. Web application users can simply write and edit the equations they know, making their work faster and easier.
AI Assistant
Last but not least, TinyMCE brought worlds of possibilities to the editor with our brand new AI Assistant plugin. With custom integration on the back end, you can bring your own AI platform to the rich text editing experience you’re creating for your users. With the AI Assistant, users in any application will find real-time writing suggestions, near instant translations in multiple languages, content editing, tone adjustments, and fact checking accelerates and elevates their working process.
This is only the beginning of the TinyMCE AI Assistant capabilities. We can’t wait to explore more of them with you next year, and find out how the AI Assistant can help your users make their process more meaningful.
What's next? Looking ahead in 2025
We’ve wrapped up a lot from this year. It’s been a very productive and meaningful year for TinyMCE as we’ve navigated the solutions to all of these challenges. From creating a better collaborative environment, to supporting developer ideas, to implementing accessible functions, our team works hard to meet the needs of our customers and users. We appreciate all your feedback on our TinyMCE Roadmap, and we look forward to spending the next year enhancing our rich text editor in many new ways.
Excited about these updates? Stay tuned for our 2025 roadmap unveiling, featuring even more tools to make your users’ workflow meaningful. Let us know which plugin you’re most excited about in the comments!
