Simple and intuitive track changes for any content workflow

April 7th, 2019

2 min read

Background

We are a small team of web professionals. Our specialty is complex plugins for WYSIWYG editors. We have two solutions you will find interesting if you need to add collaboration to TinyMCE:

FLITE, a change tracking engine, allowing authors to view, accept and reject a wide range of editing actions.
LANCE, a tool for editing and managing inline comment threads, which are discussions associated with a particular locations in the document.

The development of these plugins started as an internal project, part of a content workflow web application. Change tracking and comments were essential to the product, but it turned out there were none available on the market. We decided to take the challenge and develop the software ourselves. We’d like to share some more information specifically about FLITE.

The first version of the change tracking plugin was called LITE, which stood for Loop Index Tracking Engine; it was an open source project, based on the ICE code written for the New York Times. As the feature requests accumulated and the software was showing its age, we decided to rewrite the engine, leveraging modern web standards and development tools.

The result is FLITE—the Formidable Loop Index Tracking Engine—a commercial change tracking plugin, available as of late 2018 for TinyMCE. We entered the TinyMCE market following many requests from the web content authoring community. We hope that it meets your expectations and enhances your workflow.

Integration

FLITE works well right out of the box, although it makes more sense if you minimally configure it with user details. Other common configurations include controlling the markup that the plugin ignores (e.g. footnotes), templates for informative messages and styling of the various change regions.

See how it works

LoopIndex FLITE with TinyMCE demo screenshot

Please visit our FLITE demo page and read our documentation. We offer a free 14 day evaluation, so you can test the compatibility and efficacy of the software within your web application.

More to come

We are pretty excited about the next big feature of FLITE: tracking style changes. Monitoring additions and deletions is not a trivial task, especially in environments in which the model and view are one and the same (the DOM).

Adding style tracking is a serious challenge, but we have a lot of accumulated experience with the inner workings of online editors, as well as authors’ choices and expectations. We promise that the result will be a serious and intuitive enhancement to relevant workflows.