WYSIWYG News: HtmlArea Discontinued!

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adam2003w
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WYSIWYG News: HtmlArea Discontinued!

Post by adam2003w »

Thought someone would like to know ...

WYSIWYG News: HtmlArea Discontinued!

This monday (02/28/05) I went to the htmlarea.com forums to ask a question on a mod I was working on, and to my suprise, the forums were closed with the following message up:
The forums are temporarily closed while we update our website. htmlarea.com will be re-launching soon with a directory of wysiwyg editors from all over the web. Please try back in a few days.
Opensource projects are always tentative and may close at any time, but I was shocked the forums were down. They have a good community actively developing mods and such. So I shot interactivetools.com an email:
Interactive Tools - When will htmlarea forums be up again? I'm working on a slight mod for it and need to post some questions for help on the forum. Let me know. Thanks. - Adam
And they wrote me back with this to say:
Hi Adam,

Thanks for your email! :)

While htmlArea has always been an open source script, we've decided to
discontinue it so the forums are going to remain closed.

The good news is we'll be relaunching htmlarea.com in the near future, and
this time as a directory of WYSIWYG editors. So instead of being able to
choose from just htmlArea, you'll have an entire directory of WYSIWYG
editors to choose from.

If you want you can join the interactivetools.com newsletter and we can let
you know when htmlarea.com has been relaunched as a WYSIWYG directory, or
feel free to visit htmlarea.com occasionally and see the changes as they
unfold.

In the mean time, if you have any other questions please feel free to let me
know! :)

Best Regards,
Cliff Stefanuk - Product Specialist
interactivetools.com, inc.
Wow. Not only are the forums down but their going to remain closed. And add to that, htmlarea is discontinued! Ouch. If anyone had the itch to start a spike development of htmlarea and a community for modding. Now is the time. Well, I wrote them back:
Cliff,

Discontinue HtmlArea! Ouch. Give us some warning.

How and when do you plan to implement the new forums/site? Will it be days, weeks, months? Will you have a forum on there for htmlarea? What is your plan? You guys had a pretty good community going there. Put some ad words up and down the side and I'm sure you could at least pay for hosting the forums.

I certainly have benefitted from htmlarea and although others have said there are more advanced editors out there, I have yet to find any wysisyg editor with as good an image manager or file manager as those available as mods for htmlarea3. It was good to have a place to have a community available to contribute to and ask questions of.

Please give me a summary of what's going on. Thanks.

Adam
Man, I'm a bit bummed out. The image and file manager mods for htmlarea are so awesome. Anyone got any clue where we can start a htmlarea and htmlarea mod development community?
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Buddha443556
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Joined: Fri Mar 19, 2004 1:51 pm

Post by Buddha443556 »

While this software is highly functional, we consider it to be of “beta quality”. Unfortunately, the bad news is that there are several bugs that we can't fix. These are not our bugs, but browser bugs (which means that it's likely to find these misbehaviors in any other Web-based editor as well). Despite our best efforts to work around them, we could not. We still intend to release a final 3.0 version. We can't provide any details on when will it see the light, but we can promise that it will. Thank you for your patience.
Sound like they couldn't fix some problems they encountered in the browsers.

Have you seen? http://www.dynarch.com/forums/17
adam2003w
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Joined: Tue Mar 01, 2005 3:21 pm

Post by adam2003w »

Buddha443556 wrote:Have you seen? http://www.dynarch.com/forums/17
Are you recommending this as an alternative? Because i'm pretty sure this is the same wysiwyg editor. Infact it points to an area on sourceforge to download the files and sourceforge then says "As of 2005-01-21 10:36, this project may now be found at: http://www.htmlarea.com/ " which is now discontinuing the project.

For anyone who is a fan of htmlarea and wants to download the latest version (January 2005), I'm hosting a zip file for download here:

http://master.paradigmprint.com/master/ ... 0.0.0.html

Anybody else got any ideas about forming a new support community for this hanging opensource project?
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Buddha443556
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Post by Buddha443556 »

adam2003w wrote:
Buddha443556 wrote:Have you seen? http://www.dynarch.com/forums/17
Are you recommending this as an alternative?
Maybe. It is the website of the HTMLArea creator.
timvw
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Joined: Mon Jan 19, 2004 11:11 pm
Location: Leuven, Belgium

Post by timvw »

http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/
http://www.fckeditor.net/
http://www.kevinroth.com/rte/demo.htm

and those are only the ones i once bookmarked... so there are more out there :)
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patrikG
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Location: Sussex, UK

Post by patrikG »

timvw wrote:http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/
http://www.fckeditor.net/
http://www.kevinroth.com/rte/demo.htm

and those are only the ones i once bookmarked... so there are more out there :)
Personally, I don't think it's a tragedy at all:

1. HTMLArea is good but too feature-rich
2. the alternatives timvw mentioned are very worthy alternative projects
3. HTMLArea will continue in some form
4. Most of my clients find HTMLArea too confusing (client is, of course, always right :roll: )

So, just give or take a couple of months and you have a new revamped HTMLArea for which you'll have to pay. Personally I've found tinyMCE quite nice, it's simple, intuitive and I don't get asked stupid questions by clients. :)

Does anyone know if they have revoked the GPL license on HTMLArea?
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anjanesh
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Location: Mumbai, India

Post by anjanesh »

I was just visiting htmlArea to see if version is 3 up - I was shocked to find that its discontinued. I really liked - it was just EXCELLENT. Version 2 would suite most client's needs. It was version 3 that was complicated but on our point of view it was feature rich esp with the perl's spell check. I think the site dynarch.com belongs to the guy (Mishoo) who made htmlArea.
:cry:

But if you visit the bottom of http://www.dynarch.com/projects/htmlarea , this is whats mentioned :
Our position on this is that the editor will keep going; we are actually making quite some progress in its development, but only in house at this time. We are still planning to release version 3.0, quite possibly under a different name (so it might actually be a 1.0) but still free, at least for the core editor--some plugins might be released under a commercial license. We can't provide explicit deadlines, so please bear with us.
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anjanesh
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Hurrah

Post by anjanesh »

Good News ! This is the immediate response when I mailed him abt the discontinuation of htmlArea :
Did I ever said that I have discontinued it? :-P

What I said was "please be patient"! The project will come up, under a
new name (TagForge.com will be the site). I can't keep using "HTMLArea"
anymore because InteractiveTools has other plans for this name.

Best regards,
-Mihai
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