Questions about switching from TinyMCE 4 to HugeRTE

[elisabettac77]

Dear HugeRTE Dev Team,

We are ClassicPress (a project that forked WP 4.9 in late 2018 that retained TinyMCE and developed from there, now at our v2 that is a fork of WP 6.2.3 still retaining TinyMCE as editor).

• Please visit https://www.classicpress.net for more information about the project -

We are writing because we are in the process of evaluating possibly abandoning TinyMCE because of their decision to strip features that once upon a time were free from the Open Source version. Their decision is not making it sustainable for us in the long run to keep using it.

Currently ClassicPress uses TinyMCE v4

We have some questions for you:

Is HugeRTE in active development as of now?
How easy it is to switch from Tiny v4 to HugeRTE (that as we understand was forked from Tiny v6?)
would you be willing to help the ClassicPress project transition smoothly if eventually we decide to make the switch to HugeRTE?

Please do consider that we are still evaluating what is the best route for the project, hence our need to ask those questions above.

Since switching to another editor is a breaking change according to SemVer, we are taking our time to explore various alternatives. The change in editor would need to happen with a deprecation notice and then the release of a major version, that ideally gives us some time to explore and test solutions.

Any information you can give us to allow an informed decision would be gladly received and welcomed at this stage.

Hoping to hear from you soon, we would like to thank you all in advance for the time you are kindly going to dedicate us.

The ClassicPress Team

[carlosmintfan]

Hi @elisabettac77,
Thank you for your interest in using HugeRTE. I‘ll try to explain the benefits and disadvantages of switching from TinyMCE to HugeRTE in your project.
As your project is GPL-licensed there is no legal problem with using the latest version of TinyMCE, so the question is about features, stability, support and so on. TinyMCE has multiple employees and gains money by the commercial plans while I am a single person which also has other projects and limited time for HugeRTE (which currently can’t be increased by financial support). But other people are also helping, there is a paste from word plugin and somebody working at Naverisk also plans to contribute. And yes, I am actively working on it: I’m continually updating the docs; its latest release now fixed bundling it with ES6 and Vite; I already have removals of unused code locally on my laptop; I am currently working on support for React 19 without using deprecated functions in the React integration; the Svelte integration is almost ready. I have not yet migrated the TinyMCE jQuery integration to HugeRTE so I will have to do that before you can use HugeRTE if you are using it.
Regarding migrating from TinyMCE 4 to 6, I‘d recommend you to check out https://www.tiny.cloud/blog/how-to-migrate-from-tinymce-4-to-tinymce-5/ and https://www.tiny.cloud/blog/upgrade-to-tinymce-6/. After that, migrating to HugeRTE shouldn’t be a very big deal though…if ClassicPress has a feature that allows ClassicPress Plugins to provide TinyMCE plugins: if this feature exists (I don’t know) then it‘ll be harder. Plugins shall not reference a "tinymce" global, that would need to be "hugerte".
As a permissive license is what is importing for HugeRTE, I prefer integrating MIT-licensed third-party plugins to forking old LGPL-licensed TinyMCE plugins that were removed in TinyMCE 6. One exception I plan to make is the imagetools plugin which is so cool - but it won’t get added to this repo but a separate one if it works.
And, regarding pasting from word: There‘s a MIT-licensed plugin: https://github.com/orgs/hugemce/discussions/3 which I‘m planning to integrate as an official HugeRTE plugin. I don’t know if it works better or not that the official TinyMCE 4/5 paste plugin. That could be an important point to test for ClassicPress. Note that you should test it with TinyMCE 6, not HugeRTE.

Looking forward to your response and decisions. Best regards.

[carlosmintfan]

Regarding the third point, I'd be happy helping you by answering quick questions or making bug fixes in the HugeRTE codebase itself (unless something is too complicated for me). I won't spend hours unpaid troubleshooting issues that aren't directly related to the HugeRTE codebase itself though – I think you should understand me! Feel free to ask me any questions you may have!

[carlosmintfan]

Okay, it is some work indeed that should be done to migrate from TinyMCE 6 to HugeRTE. In this PHP class, for example (but what does it mean it is private and not included by default? Will have to dig a bit deeper into the codebase): https://github.com/ClassicPress/ClassicPress/blob/main/src/wp-includes/class-wp-editor.php. It should be carefully reviewed. Ideally all mentions of mce should be replaced by rte. And yeah, I‘ll be happy to assist you with it.