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JCE Editor

Written by Marco Conti Tuesday, 25 November 2008 22:05

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JCE (Joomla Content Editor) is a very powerful online HTML editor for the Joomla! Content Management System (CMS). JCE is easily one of the main reasons why I and many other developers use Joomla as their CMS of choice. Once you get used to JCE's depth of features going back to any other editor is frustrating and time consuming.

• Name: JCE
• Category: Text Editors
• License: GPL (some plugins are commercial)
• Joomla Version: 1.0.x, 1.5.x (native)
  
• Download Link: contenteditor.net
• CC Rating: 5 out of 5

JCE is based on TinyMCE, a venerable and powerful HTML editor but it greatly improves on it. Like TinyMCE, JCE is Open Source and free to download from joomlacontenteditor.net. However, the author, Ryan Demmer, requires a $20 annual donation for its more powerful (and most useful) plugins. Ryan went that way when he decided to take care of JCE full time (it started as a side project) and he needed to make some money to live on.

Personally, I have never found a fault with Open Source authors trying to make a living at what they do. Provided that: a) most of the application remains free and, b) the cost is reasonable, I don't think it is an issue to pay a few bucks for quality products and personal support (Ryan is really good at that).

Others have disagreed but their arguments did not make much sense to me. I much prefer to have a powerful and affordable editor like JCE than having to use an inferior free one.

JCE's commercial plugins are where the real strength is. Advanced Link allows you to browse Joomla's content structure directly from the link popup, the image manager is also very strong and allows you not only to insert images, but to re-size, rotate, make a thumbnail and manage them on the server very easily and intuitively.

Another strong plugin is the template manager. It lets you collect scripts and entire pages as HTML files ready to insert in your content.

The Media manager gives you the same level of integration with video and flash files.

JCE has gone through several versions since the early days on Joomla 1.0.x and the Joomla 1.5.x version is indeed much sleeker than it used to be.

Beside the actual editing, JCE also give the Joomla administrator great power to change its settings to fit almost every need. You can create subsets of features for different user levels, choose the level or HTML parsing and customize its interface down to the last detail.

All in all, JCE is the best Joomla editor and greatly recommended.

Get JCE

Rating 5 stars out of 5