What is FCKEditor?

Written by: Miguel Leiva-Gomez • Edited by: Michele McDonough
Published Sep 25, 2009 • Related Guides: Text Editor | Content Management Systems | Web Applications

FCKEditor is an old and widely used WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor that implements the capabilities of a word processor on your website. Learn about what makes it tick and its benefits, as well as a new editor based on it!

Introduction to FCKEditor

For six years, FCKEditor has been a widely used implementable text editor for web applications. It succeeds in providing web programmers to produce content management systems that can produce dynamic content very quickly for almost any web development language. FCK is an abbreviation for the author's name, which is Frederico Caldeira Knabben, a brazilian developer. FCKEditor is one of the most used advanced text editors on the Internet. The things that make it particularly very impressive are its professional look and its support for multiple languages.

Implementing FCKEditor in a PHP Web Project

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The first thing to do to implement FCKEditor is to include its primary PHP file in the page where you want the editor implemented. You can do this by calling include_once in your code with the file as the argument, surrounded by quotes (i.e. "include_once('fckeditor/fckeditor.php);").

After you have included the PHP code file, you should be able to initialize an instance of FCKEditor a variable. Let's create a variable called $editor. Initializing the editor should look like this: "$editor = new FCKEditor('ed1');". After doing this, define the BasePath variable in your $editor variable as the path to your FCKEditor installation. For the editor to function, you will need to call $editor->Create().

This is just a simple example. However, if you want to know more about implementing FCKEditor, check the documentation on this page.

You can also see a sample of an FCKEditor implementation here.

FCKEditor Becomes CKEditor

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In 2009, FCKEditor became better known as CKEditor, releasing an impressive new version of its dynamic text editor. Rumors say that it was renamed because the developer realized that the acronym resembles a vulgar four-letter word in the English language. CKEditor is a new editor based on FCKEditor that continues to have many of the good old features of its ancestor, but adds a very impressive set of features into the overall scheme. Since its inception in 2009, CKEditor boasted compatibility with most browsers, and even some of their "dinosaur era" versions. This makes CKEditor an ideal choice for a new programmer trying to create a content management system that will please the entire crowd of viewers that will see websites created with the system.