Flex RTE Part 1: Link Buttons
In this post earlier this week, I set out the project goal of making the Flex Rich Text Editor control a little more user-friendly. Here’s the first bit. I’ve removed the old add link textField completely and replaced it with two new buttons: “Add Link” and “Remove Link.” The popup for the “Add Link” button automatically grants focus to the text field and places the cursor after the “http://”, just to make it a little easier to use. The “Remove Link” button does two things. First, it will remove a link from any highlighted text. Second, if the current text carat is on a link (and you don’t have any text highlighted), the “Remove Link” button will figure out the beginning and end of that link and remove the whole thing.
What’s next? I’d like to have the RTE automatically apply a font color to all links so that it’s consistent with the rest of our site (this <font> tag would then be parsed out when the HTML is extracted). Then, as I mentioned in the last post, I’ll be removing the font and font size selectors–replacing them with simple Heading (h1, h2, h3…) selectors instead. Because this RTE is intended for use on a wiki-like page, headings are pretty useful while choosing between Verdana and Helvetica is something we don’t really want our users doing.
Source code: rte_link.zip
[…] Before getting into the meat of my post, I suppose it’s all right to now mention that I’m working at a site called Piqqem. As of last week we’re no longer officially in “stealth,” but we’re not quite ready to go into full-on publicity-seeking mode yet, either. The RTE code I’ve been working on is for our “Piqqem Notes,” a wiki like section for all of the stocks we cover. See also: Flex RTE Part 1: Link Buttons […]