At the heart of a content management system (CMS) is the rich text editor (RTE), quietly powering everything from blog posts to product descriptions. If the editor falls short, the entire CMS experience suffers.
TinyMCE stands out as a comprehensive solution built to handle the real-world challenges of a CMS. What do software engineering and product teams alike need from a great RTE for their CMS, and why do they continue to choose TinyMCE?
Scale demands enterprise-ready editing
A CMS needs to be capable of scaling without load problems. If the RTE inside the CMS can’t scale, neither can the CMS. Programming each individual part of the RTE to play nicely with the others and stay lightweight while so many users and assets move through the CMS takes thoughtful development.
Instead of burning months of engineering effort building an editing platform that handles scaling from scratch, choose an RTE that’s already built to handle content creation at scale and is easy to integrate. Your development team will save months of work and be available for more business-critical work.
To choose the right RTE for your CMS that’s capable of scaling, you’ll want one that can:
- Process and handle content changes quickly, even when there are thousands of users in the application.
- Handle media assets without lag.
- Adapt to many user needs through a native library of useful features that align with your CMS needs, so you don’t need to integrate a dozen plugins to meet a dozen requirements.
TinyMCE is built for this. It installs in just a few lines of code, remains stable at scale, and comes with 50+ native plugins. That means you can ship a scalable CMS faster with less developer pain along the way.
Security vulnerabilities put content systems at risk
Security is one of those things that only gets noticed when it breaks. A CMS must guard against attackers when content is published to Production. User-generated content often comes from outside applications like Google Docs or Office 365. That content comes with a lot of unnecessary HTML, leaving your frontend open to Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks and injection attacks.
On top of that, you may need your app to remain compliant with regulatory policies like SOC 2 Type-II. A safety net to mitigate these concerns is especially critical for a CMS, since new content is produced regularly that could be subject to external attacks or could be non-compliant with policies.
Instead of doing the heavy lifting of coding an editor that is secure, choose an RTE that already has security, compliance, and content sanitization built in. Meet the security requirements instantly when you integrate an RTE that’s already SOC 2 Type-II compliant, for example. Strip out unnecessary code from the HTML content to sanitize it before it’s ever published.
TinyMCE is a SOC 2 Type II-compliant rich text editor with security policies that help protect the content made in your CMS. It uses the open source DOMPurify library to provide native content sanitization and a offers your application a safety net for the content users make in your CMS. To read more, check out the TinyMCE security documentation.
Media complexity drains development resources
Media handling is one of the biggest developer headaches in CMS projects. From videos and images, editing tools, and optimization by device or browser, just getting plugins to work together can burn weeks of engineering time.
This is where the right rich text editor comes in. Instead of all that blood, sweat, and tears over media storage, optimization, and the user experience, you can choose an RTE that does all of the above. It’s rare that an RTE can actually handle everything we’ve mentioned so far, but as you might expect at this point, there’s one that can.
With TinyMCE’s media optimization feature Image Optimizer, powered by Uploadcare, you only need one plugin to bring native, complex, precise media handling and optimization to your CMS. Your users can upload media right in the content editor where it’s hosted, scaled, and optimized immediately. No fuss or development pain, and months of time saved.
Cross-platform content challenges quality
Users don’t only type directly in the RTE–they copy content from all kinds of platforms into your CMS. In most cases, the rich content that’s getting pasted isn’t just text: it’s HTML, images, videos, links, styles, fonts, fixed widths… The list goes on.
Don’t let your developers get frustrated trying to engineer a custom solution that integrates content from any and every major content editing app. Even just writing the code to handle every major probable case for content and where it’s pasted from would be a lengthy task. What am I going to say? You guessed it–choose an RTE that’s already got content conversion built right in.
TinyMCE handles content conversion needs with a series of useful features that can be added to the RTE with one or two words. That’s all that’s needed to bring in powerful features, such as:
- PowerPaste: A great example of a highly useful plugin if your users often copy and paste between your CMS and other apps. This plugin maintains the original formatting without breaking the content.
- Export to PDF, Import from Word, and Export to Word: A trio of popular features that make working with Office 365 and Google Docs a simple and easy task for your users.
- Inline CSS: Allows you to maintain page styles using inline CSS, so users can keep their complex content intact.
- Templates: Helps you create a menu of clickable templates that can be inserted in a moment.
- Math Equations: Lets users write scientific notation and equations in LaTeX or MathML.
TinyMCE has a ton of options that allow you to create a CMS with content rules and automated standards, so your users spend less time on small fixes and more time on content creation.
Inaccessible content limits your reach
Every content management system should be accessible, from a content quality perspective and in some cases for compliance. You want to enable your CMS users to produce high-quality content, so making features like spell checking, autocorrect, link checking, and word count available is important. Accessibility for audiences is also important, so the content produced in your CMS is WCAG compliant. You don’t want visitors to leave the site because the content isn’t accessible.
With the right rich text editor, it’s possible to ensure that any content in a CMS is available to as wide an audience as possible, and is high-quality. You want your users to feel confident when they’re using your CMS to create. And you don’t want your engineers to have to integrate a new library for every accessibility feature, spell checker, or word count. If you choose a headless editor framework, they’ll have to consider the accessibility implications for every color, button, and font choice they make.
Choosing a flexible RTE that has an extensive catalog of native features is the easiest way to go. You can save your development team months of development (perhaps years at this point) by simply integrating an accessible RTE from the beginning.
TinyMCE is that RTE. Not only is TinyMCE designed with accessibility in mind, there are many additional features ready to make content even more accessible for a wide audience. The TinyMCE Accessibility Checker maintains WCAG standards and keeps content compliant. Features such as Spell Checker and Spelling Autocorrect are a must for any CMS heavy on written content. Link Checker is a necessary feature to ensure links are valid and won’t lead a frustrated visitor astray in Production. Word Count and Case Change are both helpful nice-to-haves for a CMS that improve the user experience.
Isolated workflows hinder team performance
A CMS has a crowd of users at any given time. Between creators, editors, managers, and approvals necessary for systems in regulated industries, collaboration is a necessary part of modern CMSs. Making all of this possible through managing identity and permissions inside the content editor is just another feature that’s complicated and painful to develop. And that’s where the right RTE comes in.
You’ll want to choose a rich text editor for your CMS that has collaboration features built in and has centralized user handling to make development even easier. This shortens the time to market for your CMS, and saves your developers from focusing on complicated functionality that’s already available as an RTE feature.
TinyMCE is ideal for collaboration within a CMS for a number of reasons. First, the User Lookup API makes it simple to create a powerful collaboration environment with the Suggested Edits, Mentions, and Comments premium features.
- Suggested Edits allows users to work together inline, leave feedback, and approve or deny changes made.
- Comments allows users to comment inline and discuss content.
- Mentions allows users to type the familiar @ symbol and choose a colleague from a dropdown list to alert them to something in the content or in a comment.
Second, Revision History, another powerful premium collaboration feature in TinyMCE, records changes between content versions. It’s critical for any CMS in a regulated industry or a CMS that requires audit trails. Revision History preserves changes from version to version, so that if users need to retrieve lost information or restore a previous backup, it’s all right there in the content editor.
Read more about how the User Lookup API works in our developer blog, or learn about how to add Suggested Edits to TinyMCE and try out the code for yourself.
Generic editors create painful compromises
Maybe your CMS has even more complex needs, and your requirements go beyond what we’ve mentioned here. Advanced customization is necessary more often than not since each individual CMS meets a specific need, whether that’s ecommerce listings, articles for publishing, legal correspondence, or some other use case.
To tailor to your CMS’s individual needs, TinyMCE has a library of over 50 different open source and premium plugins. From simple bold-italic formatting for something like a lead paragraph or a page title, to a full-on article editor with video embeds, tables, and math formulas (and sometimes both on the same page! 😱 ), you can use TinyMCE to build the exact rich text editor for your CMS. Some of the most popular TinyMCE plugins used in CMSs by developers around the world today are:
And there are a host of other options like Autoresize, Visual Blocks, and more. If you’re interested, check out the TinyMCE plugin documentation to see what else is available. Whatever you need for your CMS, TinyMCE likely has it ready to rock.
Wrap up: Try TinyMCE for free
If you’d like to build a CMS with TinyMCE for yourself, get a free 14-day trial of TinyMCE with premium features included and add as many plugins as your heart desires. Customize TinyMCE with any and all of the features you need to try out. With the free trial you’ll get to experience, first, hand, the unique strengths that TinyMCE brings to CMS projects.
