HTMLArea -- the free
customizable online editor

HTMLArea is a free, customizable online editor. It works inside your browser. It uses a non-standard feature implemented in Internet Explorer 5.5 or better for Windows and Mozilla 1.3 or better (any platform), therefore it will only work in one of these browsers.

HTMLArea is copyright InteractiveTools.com and Dynarch.com and it is released under a BSD-style license. HTMLArea is created and developed upto version 2.03 by InteractiveTools.com. Version 3.0 developed by Mihai Bazon for InteractiveTools. It contains code sponsored by third-party companies as well. Please see our About Box for details about who sponsored what plugins.

Online demos

Even this it's not maintained anymore, here are 2 plugins that never were released, but are included in this last bundle:

• ObjectInspector is a plugin that allows you to style any element.
• BreakQuote is useful in "reply to this message" type of editors, where you have a quote of the original message. Typing ENTER anywhere in this quote will break the element.

Other demos below:

• HTMLArea standard -- contains the core editor.
• HTMLArea + tables -- loads the TableOperations plugin which provides some extra editing features for tables.
• HTMLArea + spell checher -- loads the SpellChecker plugin which provides what its name says: a spell checker. This one requires additional support on the server-side.
• HTMLArea Full HTML Editor -- loads the FullPage plugin which allows you to edit a full HTML page, including <title>, <!DOCTYPE...> and some other options.
• HTMLArea with Context Menu -- this plugin provides a nice and useful context menu.
• HTMLArea fully loaded -- all of the above. ;-)

Installation

Installation is (or should be) easy. You need to unpack the ZIP file in a directory accessible through your webserver. Supposing you unpack in your DocumentRoot and your DocumentRoot is /var/www/html as in a standard RedHat installation, you need to acomplish the following steps: (the example is for a Unix-like operating system)

cd /var/www/html
unzip /path/to/archive/HTMLArea-3.0-last-20071025.zip
mv HTMLArea-3.0-last-20071025 htmlarea
find htmlarea/ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find htmlarea/ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find htmlarea/ -name "*.cgi" -exec chmod 755 {} \;

Notes. You may chose to symlink "htmlarea" to "HTMLArea-3.0-last-20071025", in which case your server needs to be configured to "FollowSymLinks". You need to make sure that *.cgi files are interpreted as CGI scripts. If you want to use the SpellChecker plugin you need to have a recent version of Perl installed (I recommend 5.8.0) on the server, and the module Text::Aspell, available from CPAN. More info in "plugins/SpellChecker/readme-tech.html".

About how to setup your pages to use the editor, please read the [outdated yet generally valid] documentation.

Status and links

HTMLArea has reached version 3.0. As of this version, it supports:

• Customizable toolbar
• Easy internationalization
• Plugin-based infrastructure
• Delivers W3-compliant HTML (with few exceptions)
• Has a subset of Microsoft Word's keyboard shortcuts
• Full-screen editor
• Advanced table operations (by external plugin "TableOperations")
• Spell checker (by external plugin "SpellChecker")
• probably more... ;-)

We have a project page at SourceForge.net. There you can also find out how to retrieve the code from CVS, or you can browse the CVS online. We also have a bug system, a patch tracking system and a feature request page.

We invite you to say everything you want about HTMLArea on the forums at InteractiveTools.com. There you should also find the latest news.

Sometimes I post news about the latest developments on my personal homepage.

"It doesn't work, what's wrong?"

If it doesn't work, you have several options:

• Post a message to the forum. Describe your problem in as much detail as possible. Include errors you might find in the JavaScript console (if you are a Mozilla user), or errors displayed by IE (though they're most of the times useless).
• If you're positive that you discovered a bug in HTMLArea then feel free to fill a bug report in our bug system. If you have the time you should check to see if a similar bug was reported or not; it might be fixed already in the CVS ;-) If you're positive that a similar bug was not yet reported, do fill a bug report and please include as much detail as possible, such as your browser, OS, errors from JavaScript console, etc.
• If you want a new feature to be implemented, post it on the features request and someone will hopefully take care of it.

You can contact me directly only if you want to pay me for implementing custom features to HTMLArea. If you want to sponsor these features (that is, allow them to get back into the public HTMLArea distribution) I'll be cheaper. ;-)