The Ephox team continues to bring additional value to our TinyMCE Enterprise customers with the release of several new important features along with updates to existing ones. These take the form of an accessibility checker, the arrival of AtMentions to TinyMCE and a new spell check dialog that optionally replaces the default inline spell check functionality.
Accessibility Checker
The biggest news in this release benefits developers for whom accessibility is critical to the usability of their solutions. TinyMCE’s new accessibility checker (based on technology built by Ephox) makes checking for common accessibility issues incredibly easy for content creators, using an interface that steps them through each error and in most cases also recommends a solution.
The check is achieved within the editor before the user posts (publishes) their content and uses an optimized interface allowing users to step through the document and check for errors with ease.
The checker operates in a similar fashion to running a spell check in Word, where a dialog walks the user through identified errors. It is a familiar experience for most people that will require little to no training.
Before the introduction of this feature users would have to manually check for errors, requiring an advanced knowledge of accessibility and typically an understanding of HTML. Most people creating content with an editor such as TinyMCE don’t possess these skills and if they do fixing errors can be an incredibly time-consuming task.
Common accessibility issues include missing ALT text on images, captions on tables, contrast color issues and split links, along with many other standard checks.
A live demo of the accessibility checker can be found on tinymce.com along with the documentation here.
AtMentions
It is now possible for users of your application to send notifications to other users through an @mention in the document with the addition of AtMentions to TinyMCE’s Enterprise offering. AtMentions are of course incredibly commonplace in social software such as Twitter and Facebook along with social enterprise applications such as IBM’s Connections suite.
TinyMCE developers should note that this feature requires a backend integration with a system to handle listing of users, as well as sending the notification. This is clearer in our example code, but basically, there are two integration points: getting a userlist when @abc… is typed, and on submitting the form, sending a notification to the @mentions in the document.
The value to developers building modern enterprise solutions is obvious. Your users communicate every day using @mentions on social networks, and they expect to be able to use them when creating content too.
This screenshot shows an example of this implemented, the hover content can be customized in any way you wish.
Spell Check Dialog Mode
At the request of many enterprise customers, we added a new spell check dialog option to the spell checker functionality that when enabled turns the spell check-as-you-type feature off and replaces it with a user-facing dialog (window).
Much like the accessibility checker function, the new spell check dialog will be familiar to users of most word processing software, including Microsoft Word. The dialog steps a user through identified errors and gives them the option to either change or ignore mistakes.
For TinyMCE developers, the new option is called `spellchecker_dialog` and can be set to `true` or `false`, `false` being the default option.
Other Updates
In addition to the major updates noted above, the TinyMCE team made some tweaks to the user interface, fixed a few issues and brought a change to our jQuery package in TinyMCE.
Updated notifications and dialogs now have a small animation when being opened. We also put a solid color background on notifications (the semi-transparent background just didn’t make any sense).
We fixed some issues when pasting large images into the editor. This feature should now work more consistently across browsers.
There are a couple of minor updates to the very popular `contentEditable=false` functionality we added in our last major (4.x) release, and we are seeing more and more developers take advantage of this advanced feature! Thanks everyone for your feedback.
One noteworthy change is that we removed our special jQuery package and replaced it with a `jquery.tinymce.min.js` wrapper file in the standard package instead. Doing this cuts down on the release packages and provides a cleanup of the enterprise version packaging. Enterprise customers should contact Ephox customer support to get a new link to the correct version.
Lastly, we made various minor updates to tables and improved IME and Edge support since the last enterprise release. With the new features and these updates and fixes, we encourage you to grab the latest version!
Open Source Updates
Various fixes to the open source were also released with a version bump to 4.3.8. See the changelog here.
