There has been a lot said about the editor that currently ships with Moodle. The editor is called HTMLArea and is another Open Source project. Sadly this project has officially been closed and no longer sees any real activity.

This has led to Moodle having an editor that does not work with many of the new browsers on the block. A main one in my case with Macs is Safari!

Now some might think that just replacing the editor should be easy, but sadly due to the many customizations that Moodle developers have made over the years, this is not as easy as it sounds. The File manager is a major component to start with. Good news is that now there is an alternative.

Glen Davis from the Moodle.org forums has created a hack that allows administrators to change from HTMLArea to the exciting TinyMCE3 editor. This is the same editor used in Joomla and Mambo. It offers many advantages over it’s predecessor including a nice clean interface, a great file manager, it works in all browsers and the fact it is still being very actively developed.

Now the good news is that this editor is intended to be included in Moodle 2.0. But many users cannot wit that long. If you are one of them you can head to this site to grab the code, and by following the reasonably simple instructions you can have the new editor running in under 10 minutes. This will require you to make small changes to your theme and add one line to lib/formslip.php. But this work is well worth the payoff for a truly cross browser editor.

I have been using this code on all my production sites for the last 2 months and have no issues to report. You can however follow the conversation at the Moodle forums for the latest updates and news on bugs that may arise. You can also visit the Moodle Playpen site to see it in action.

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This post is tagged editor, hack, HTMLArea, Moodle, Moodle2.0, Playpen, TinyMCE3