The evolution of FCKeditor to CKEditor promises significant improvements, and some of them are delivered in CKEditor 3.0.  The biggest improvement is speed - CKEditor loads significantly faster than FCKeditor in our unofficial tests.  But there are a few missing pieces that need to be addressed before we can integrate the latest visual editor.

Hits (improvements):
- load time (speed)
- accessibility
- multi-language improvements
- AJAX improvements
- Custom config file to simplify updates
- New Spell-check-as-you-type (Scayt) function
- did we say speed?

Misses:
- Quick upload and file browsing are not included (yet), and were replaced by commercial-license-only CKFinder
- Some other FCKeditor 2.6.4.1 functions not yet working in CKEditor 3.0 (e.g. Div button, Universal Keyboard, ability to set height of visual editor as a %)

Most of the misses should be addressed in the next release, 3.1.  A limited version of CKFinder will be included, though the limitations haven't been announced.  The DIV button is already in the SVN version, and ability to set height as a % has been announced.  The Universal Keyboard will not be restored due to licensing issues.

Another change that impacts nukeWYSIWYG™ is the way the editor is loaded.  While FCKeditor 2.6.4.1 loaded the JS on demand (i.e. in the BODY section), CKEditor requires that it be loaded in the HEAD section.  This appears to have been done to improve speed and also to enable the ability to more easily activate the editor for all visible textareas.  Although this change succeeds on all fronts, it requires additional complexity in the installation of the CKEditor JS in the HEAD section, and may require changes to PHP-Nuke and RavenNuke™ modules, addons, tweaks to avoid loading the HEAD JS on every page.

We'll wait for the misses to be addressed in the CKEditor 3.1 release before updating nukeWYSIWYG™ (or at least until we find an open source file manager that can be integrated and that works consistently).  In the mean time, we'll work out the details on the changes required to load CKEditor in the HEAD section...

Read more for details on the toolbar function changes and on open-source alternatives to CKFinder.