[TYPO3-rte] TYPO3 and CkEditor

[Zachary Davis, Cast Iron Coding LLC]

Martin Kutschker wrote:

> I had the same thought when I read this. TYPO3 comes already with a page browser (aka element
> wizard). The RTE should use it. If it isn't good enough (I see much room for improvement) improve
> it, don't add one that can only be used with a specific RTE.

Gee, fellas -- it's not exactly inspiring to get the critique before any 
code has even been released. Why are you assuming that we've written 
something that's so tightly coupled to this specific application that it 
can't be reused?

As I said, we've written a couple dozen lines of PHP in a backend 
module, that is mainly a wrapper around a CORE class. We've also written 
a couple dozen lines of javascript that uses ExtJS to render the tree by 
way of AJAX calls to the module, which returns JSON. The code we've 
written is quality, object-oriented code, and the JSON responder 
(implemented as a stand-alone class) that uses the CORE webPageTree 
class simple turns an array into JSON.

The extJs tree component is so ridiculously easy to use, it's hardly 
worth putting it in a stand-alone extension. In no way have we 
reinvented the wheel here. What we've done, instead, is put together 
some glue between the extJS tree UI and existing core methods for 
getting the page tree. Moreover, we've encapsulated this glue in a 
stand-alone class that could be easily packaged in another extension or 
into the core.

I do think that there should be a core class that can return JSON 
representations of the page tree, and that it's way more difficult than 
it should be to render the tree in a backend module. If we had this API, 
an extension developer can write the 10 or 15 lines of javascript 
required to render the page tree using extJS.

Zach