Changing the HTML Editor

Overview

There may be instances where you might want to change the default editor that is used in the store administration editor for rich text or HTML-based content in your catalog. Hotcakes allows you to do this somewhat easily, but it requires that you have access to the web.config or website configuration file.

Requirements

The following pre-requisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

Access to the website file system or a host/superuser account
Basic understanding of XML or HTML

Getting Started

Before you can get started changing the HTML editor, you should first login to your web server or login to DNN using a host/superuser account. This can be done using FTP too, if you're familiar with it.

You’ll see that the configuration file we're doing to be managing is written in XML. If you don’t know XML, don’t worry. The changes made here can be made by anyone with even a very basic knowledge of HTML.

If you are logging in to your web server, navigate in the file system to the hotcakes.config file in the path below. Open it in your favorite text editor. Don't use Microsoft Word or any other word processing application.

~\DesktopModules\Hotcakes\

You may not realize this, but there are three (3) HTML editors that come standard with Hotcakes Commerce. These editors are used in the store administration to provide merchants with an easy way to create rich text and HTML-based content for the objects in the store that customers will see.

Changing the editor you want to use is as easy and changing or adding a single line of code to your web.config. Just be aware that if you have multiple stores on the same website, this change will apply to all of them.

The table below shows the editors that you can choose to use. While two (2) of them are WYSIWYG or HTML editors, they both have nearly the same features.

Editor Name	Description
None	This editor is nothing more than a large textbox. Use this option if you want to enforce more of a plain text option for your merchants. These fields will still accept HTML if it is hand written.
RadEditor	(default) The RadEditor is provided by telerik and is the default used by Hotcakes. This is the same editor that is being used by the CMS. RadEditor is a commercial product with support available from telerik.
TinyMCE	TinyMCE is a LGPL licensed open source editor. It is very similar to RadEditor.
RadEditorAdvanced	The RadEditorAdvanced option is the same exact editor as RadEditor, only you have some additional options available to you. Some of these options include tables, styles, and indention.

Now that you are familiar with the options that you have, let’s look at how one is changed.

Find the setting with the key of DefaultTextEditor. The value is what you'll want to change.

You simply need to change the editor name using one from the table above into the value attribute (None, RadEditor, TinyMCE, or RadEditorAdvanced).

Once you've entered your preferred editor, save your changes. Depending on the Editor Name you put into the code, it will look like one of the examples below. That’s all there is to it!