Using Tinymce with Interchange

Interchange the ecommerce application based upon perl has a HTMLAREA widget within the backend that can be used to provide a rich text area for editing content. This can be configured to use fckeditor or htmlarea however I find both these editors a bit ugly and hard to configure, there also over the top for what most of my clients are looking for.

My prefered editor is tinymce which is a powerful editor which is much newer and much easier to provide new features for. To allow me to use tinymce i created the following widget tag which can be used to provide the tinymce editor in the interchange backend, the edityor can be used in several modes, simple or advanced.

Installation

To install the plugin download and install tinymce from the tinymce website and install in your httpdocs. If you are rewriting your cgi-bin using rewrite rules you will need to add a rule to your configuration, e.g.

RewriteRule  /tinymce(.*)  -  [PT,L]

once you’ve installed tinymce download the widget using the link below

tinymce.widget.zip.

Unzip and save tinymce.widget to the interchange/usertag folder. Once added make sure to check your interchange.cfg is set to look for .widget files in the usertag folder. Find the comment # Include individual usertags in your cfg and add to the line below usertags/*.widget so the line should look something like

# Include individual usertags.
include usertags/*.filter usertags/*.widget

Restart interchange and you can start using the widget.

Usage

To use the editor in your interchange administrator interface use the meta information editor for the field you want to change. This is the icon on the right of the field on the flex select page. In the widget field type tinymce and then exit and reenter and you will now see the advanced options tab which allows you to select the type of editor simple or advanced. If you have multiple editors on the page they must all have the same type you cant mix advanced and simple editors.