CKEditor 4 has been the solid foundation for richtext editing in CoreMedia Studio for a long time. The latest version CKEditor 5 is a complete rewrite and CKEditor 4 will not receive new features anymore. It will still be available in CMCC v11, but it will only receive maintenance updates and it will be removed in the major release that follows CMCC v11.

As plugins need to be rewritten from scratch, which applies to CoreMedia CKEditor 4 plugins like for data-processing, too, CoreMedia decided to take the chance to revise the complete architecture for CoreMedia Studio integration.

Most important: The toolbar for richtext editing actions will now be a native CKEditor 5 toolbar rather than redirection via an Ext JS toolbar. You will benefit from this, as it is now straightforward adding CKEditor plugins as provided by CKEditor marketplace.

The adaptations for running CKEditor 5 in the CoreMedia CMS eco-system are provided as loosely coupled plugins. These, if possible, provide extension points (mostly in configuration layer) for several use-cases known from customer projects. For example, data-processing, responsible for mapping CoreMedia Richtext 1.0 to HTML and vice versa can now easily be extended as part of the configuration of CKEditor’s ClassicEditor instance. Thus, integrating plugins like CKEditor’s Highlight Plugin just requires one additional step in CoreMedia CMS eco-system: Provide a mapping from <mark> element to some representation in CoreMedia richtext and vice versa.

In one of the early AEP releases of CMCC v11 the default will change from CKEditor 4 to CKEditor 5. You can then keep the existing version. However, new features will only be implemented for the new rich text editor. As such, we discourage customizing the CKEditor 4 based rich text editor – and if required, ensure to keep a specification as it is likely, that you will have to rewrite the customizations for CKEditor 5. More information is available at https://support.coremedia.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020791099-Roadmap-to-CKEditor-5-in-CMCC-v11.

In the early releases of CMCC v11 you can already enable a preview of the current state of the richtext editor based on CKEditor 5 for development purposes. To simplify the switch from version 4 to 5 some changes to configuration of the richtext editor had to be implemented. Please have a look at the breaking changes, described in Section 6.4.3, “Adapting CKEditor 4 Extensions”