Dries Buytaert

Spark update: WYSIWYG editing for Drupal

After a lot of discussion and testing, we decided to adopt the Aloha Editor as the WYSIWYG editor for Spark, and possibly for Drupal 8 core. Check out Wim's blog for the details. In short, it is the best HTML5 based WYSIWYG editor; fast, well-written and future-proof.

Here is a screenshot of our latest designs of how we envision integrating the Aloha Editor in Spark on a mobile device:

Aloha spark mobile
By tapping into a rich text field such as Body, a toolbar comes up with two tabs with editor buttons below: Format (containing buttons such as Bold, Italic, Left/Right Align, and Lists) and Insert (for Links, Images, and the like).

I also wanted to give a big thank you to Haymo Meran, creator of Aloha Editor and Director of Product Experience at Gentics Software GmbH, both for hosting a Drupal/Aloha collaboration sprint at his company's offices in Vienna last month, and also for changing the license of Aloha Editor to GPLv2+ (from AGPLv3) so that it could be used with Drupal!

It's an incredible gift to the Drupal project and the Open Source community at large. Thanks!

— Dries Buytaert