I took part in a hackathon a few weeks ago and we needed a text editor that we could easily implement and customize. In particular, we wanted more control over the appearance of the toolbar -- we wanted to use our own buttons and move them vertically to the left of the text area -- and needed to capture events related to entering text.
We started with CKEditor, found it far too complicated and with a ton of old and unclear documentation floating around, and had to work against its default features to get it scaled back to the minimal editor we wanted. We weren't able to move the buttons to the left-hand side and couldn't style them as easily as we wanted to. Maybe it's buried deep in the docs somewhere but I couldn't tell you, there's a lot there and it's overwhelming for someone who's just getting started and on a time constraint.
Frustrated, we switched to WYSIHTML5 and were able to get exactly what we were looking for very quickly.
I've come to see CKEditor as the WordPress of WYSIWYG text editors: it aims to do ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING for everyone, but that's not what everyone is looking for. Maybe things would have gone differently if we weren't under the gun but when we were in a pinch, we found WYSIHTML5 to be a much better option.
We started with CKEditor, found it far too complicated and with a ton of old and unclear documentation floating around, and had to work against its default features to get it scaled back to the minimal editor we wanted. We weren't able to move the buttons to the left-hand side and couldn't style them as easily as we wanted to. Maybe it's buried deep in the docs somewhere but I couldn't tell you, there's a lot there and it's overwhelming for someone who's just getting started and on a time constraint.
Frustrated, we switched to WYSIHTML5 and were able to get exactly what we were looking for very quickly.
I've come to see CKEditor as the WordPress of WYSIWYG text editors: it aims to do ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING for everyone, but that's not what everyone is looking for. Maybe things would have gone differently if we weren't under the gun but when we were in a pinch, we found WYSIHTML5 to be a much better option.