Cal Jacobson’s Blog

My current project at work — an ambitious ASP.NET 2.0 application — is in need of an inline, user-friendly text editor. After a bout of Googling, I narrowed the list of contenders down to FCKeditor and FreeTextBox. Both offered what I was looking for: a free (or low-cost) cross-browser solution with a MS Word-like interface. FCKeditor featured a nice variety of sample projects and could be implemented strictly in JavaScript; FreeTextBox was a full-on ASP.NET web component. I played around with both and discovered that the sticky wicket was spell checking, of all things.

FCKeditor utilized ieSpell and Speller Pages; the former being an installable, Internet-Explorer only spellchecker and the latter being a PHP-based option. ieSpell was right out: although our client uses IE 6 exclusively, there was no guarantee that they would continue to do so throughout the life of the project…as a result we were using Firefox 1.5 as a sanity check to avoid future headaches (either due to a full switch to another browser or the compatibility issues that IE 7 threatens to bring). If that weren't enough, our client's systems are locked down so much that it would be unlikely that ieSpell could be easily installed on users' machines.

FreeTextBox also used ieSpell in addition to NetSpell, which is an Open Source .NET project. Hey, this was perfect! Drag, drop, fire and forget!

Well, not exactly. NetSpell isn't included with the FTB distribution and it doesn't recognize the DLL if you just drop it into /Bin, no matter how nicely you ask. FreeTextBox's advantage over FCKeditor evaporated.

Both editors have pretty anemic documentation — to use a map analogy it's good enough to get you from home to the grocery store and back, but you're completely screwed if you're also trying to go to the library…let alone if you wanted to take a shortcut through a park or two. I realize that this is to be expected for most Open Source projects, but it's a little disheartening to see FreeTextBox suffer from it as well…and in fact FCKeditor had better documentation in this case though its wiki is in dire need of some work.

I decided to take a look at the online demos of both widgets. No dice: FCKeditor doesn't even enable the spell check button, and FreeTextBox displays a "NetSpell libraries not properly linked" alertbox. Gee, thanks.

That left only one option: wading through forums. Ugh. Your mileage may vary, but more often than not I feel dumber and angrier after going through support forums…usually after running across a half-dozen or so posts like this:

I'm having trouble trying to get X to do Y and I'm getting error Z. Help!

Ok, that in itself isn't too bad…I usually come across these posts because I'm getting error Z. What causes my head to explode are the follow-ups by the original poster that inevitably look like this:

Never mind, I figured it out.

…with no further details. Every fiber of my being craves the ability to inflict pain upon such morons (or Help Vampires, to use the scientific term).

But I digress. After unsuccessfully surfing through the FCKeditor forums at SourceForge (which are abysmal by default since there's no way to search for a topic) and the FreeTextBox forums, I came across this post by Drone where all was revealed. Well, enough was revealed for my purposes at least. Drone is my hero, even if he doesn't know it.

As a result, I was able to get FreeTextBox up and running on our development website. That is, until another cryptic error cropped up today. A FTB developer responded and said it would be fixed in Monday's release…unfortunately it's now Thursday. I'm hoping that he's just swamped and the solution is forthcoming, because at this point it would really suck to switch to FCKeditor. Stay tuned, I guess.