Jiffycms HTML Editor V1.0 is an open source editor with commercial grade features most of which facilitate development and as you will see from this short showcase, embedding jiffycms HTML Editor into your
pages is easy, straightfoward, requires no dependencies but above all, it does not require that you learn something new or setup your projects in a certain
way etc. Jiffycms Editor simply works provided you know how to D R A G and D R O P.
I just put it up on CodePlex, so you can check it out right away if you like. In this article, I just want to showoff some of it's designtime capabilities. Even if your not used to or like using VS.NET in designmode, you might want to do exactly this since dragging and dropping on the designer surface will allow it to register a needed HttpHandler and the many properties and settings can be overwhelming for first time usage.
Following are some key DesignTime features that you will appreciate. The HTML Editor itself comprises of a single dll with no other dependencies, so first
thing you will notice if you love the Visual studio designer is that all you need to do is add it to your Toolbox.
And that's it. That is likely the hardest work you will be doing. From there, it's only a matter of dragging and dropping the editor onto your page.
Then, it's just a matter of making a few settings in the property grid.
Toolbars, tabs, custom dictionaries, custom css classes and what not, all support designtime collection editors in VS.NET ; It just makes adding custom
customizations real easy or if you prefer working manually in HtmlView, then you can do just that.
Or if you prefer to work in HtmlView, you can very well do just that
By default, all css needed to render the htmleditor are embedded in the head section of your page at runtime. You can however extract all the
autogenerated css using the apposite designer reachable through the SmartTag in VS.NET designer.
You simply copy the css into an external css file, and then
pass a reference to it via the ExternalStyleSheet property exposed by the editor and your good to go. This simply allows the css to be cachable by the
browser and giving you the best of performance.
By default Jiffycms HTML editor renders icons for each item in the toolbar. This can quickly get overwhelming, request wise due to the many toolbar items.
To improve performance, you may try imagesprite rendering instead. This groups icons in groups of 10-15 etc and this way, instead of 50 icons, you may end up
with only 5 or less depending on how they are grouped.
If you do not plan to change the icons or customize them, this is a great option. While customizations
is possible in imagesprites mode, it's not as straight foward but still very much possible in the same way.