Current state and future of quill editor in Pimcore?

[studio1gmbh-pimcore]

Hi there,

Quill seems to have quite a hard start in Pimcore. The community, including ourself experience quite a lot of problems.

By default, Quill is a pretty stripped down editor. Many features that the community was used to from CKEditor and TinyMCE are missing. (eg. #9, #11 and we are missing iFrames and Anchors btw)

The Pimcore implementation also have some cosmetic as well as significant bugs (eg. #12, #8, #7, #6)

We've updated the first projects with Quill and unfortunately it is not usable at all in our daily work. Developers and editors currently have a very hard time, getting their content in the frontend.

The official docs say:

Due to changes in TinyMCE’s licensing model, we were required to find a new WYSIWYG editor. After careful research
we’ve chosen Quill as replacement.
https://github.com/pimcore/platform-version/blob/v2024.4/doc/03_Release_Notes/2024.4.md?plain=1#L23-L25

I don't doubt, that the dev team "careful researched" the new editor, but the basic features does not seem to be tested as careful. I know, a solution had to be found as a replacement. Such things can happen in the Open Source universe. But the default WYSIWYG editor is not a nice to have feature. It's an important core function of Pimcore, especially in CMS oriented projects. Therefore it should be reliable and stable to use.

So our main question to the development team are:

• How do you see the future development of Quill in Pimcore?
• Is the goal to achieve a similar level of stability and feature set as CKEditor or TinyMCE?
• Are there plans to introduce more of the missing features, or will the focus primarily be on fixing critical bugs?
• Should we assume that the community will need to develop these additional features on their own and/or switching to some other editor using the provided interfaces?

In order to better assess the situation for us and our customers, it would also be helpful gain some insight and background information into the reasoning behind choosing Quill.

Thanks for your feedback in advance!

/JKO

[brusch]

@studio1gmbh-pimcore

Thank you for reaching out and sharing your feedback, we definitely understand how crucial a reliable WYSIWYG editor is for Pimcore and we also knew that changing the default editor would come with some challenges.
TinyMCE is a robust product with a rich feature set and we haven't found a product that is entirely equal to it and is also available under a Pimcore-compatible license. We did a lot of research and also tests (e.g. with Lexical) for more than 2 month and it turned out that Quill is the best fit for a replacement, even though we knew that it isn't a drop in replacement (at the moment) that comes with all the features TinyMCE has on board. But we needed to get this project of a new WYSIWYG started and we know that there are still some topics open, but for the time being, TinyMCE is also still there, you can still use it and we still support it.

Regarding your questions:

How do you see the future development of Quill in Pimcore?

Quill is the future in Pimcore as we need to go away from TinyMCE.
We'll of course further improve the integration bit by bit, but this will also be focused on the future Studio UI integration, as we still have TinyMCE in Classic UI as an alternative.

Is the goal to achieve a similar level of stability and feature set as CKEditor or TinyMCE?

Of course that's the goal and we're confident that Quill develops in that direction or that those features are provided by additional modules (such as tables at the moment).
If we see the need we are also open to contribute features to Quill.

Are there plans to introduce more of the missing features, or will the focus primarily be on fixing critical bugs?

Our top priority is as always to fix bugs, then improvements and features.

Should we assume that the community will need to develop these additional features on their own and/or switching to some other editor using the provided interfaces?

Of course it would be great if the community would contribute features either directly to Quill or if necessary to Pimcore, this would definitely bring some speed into the development.
TinyMCE will be extracted into it's own package, you can then still use it in your projects if needed, but it won't be updated anymore (for licensing reasons).

If you have any further questions -> just let us know 😊

[olivermerz]

@brusch thanks for your explanation.

TinyMCE will be extracted into it's own package, you can then still use it in your projects if needed, but it won't be updated anymore (for licensing reasons).

Does this mean that TinyMCE can still be used as an alternative for Quill in the upcoming Pimcore versions? Can it then be used in Pimcore core (e.g. in WYSIWYG Editable for documents and data objects) without any problems? Or is a complex workaround necessary for this?

[brusch]

@olivermerz For Admin UI Classic yes, but as mentioned: it won't get any further updates, so I'd be careful with the statement "without any problems" but personally I'm not expecting any serious issues, as TinyMCE is quite a stable product 😉