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FCKEditor 2.6.2 is released - fixes page scroll on ENTER

Posted June 25th, 2008 in Applications (Updated June 26th, 2008)

FCKEditor 2.6.2 was released today with a number of bug fixes and minor improvements including an issue where the whole page scrolled down when pressing the enter key in the recently released Mozilla Firefox 3.0 and Opera 9.5. This post looks at the issue and how I go about upgrading FCKEditor on the websites in which I have it installed.

Bugfixes and improvements

A list of the new features and improvements and fixed bugs for the FCKEditor 2.6.2 release are listed below, taken from the FCKEditor website. The #number links click through to the bug report they are talked about.

New Features and Improvements:

• [#2043] The debug script is not any more part of the compressed files. If FCKeditor native debugging features (FCKDebug) are required, the _source folder must be present in your installation.

Fixed Bugs:

• [#2248] Calling FCK.InsertHtml( 'nbsp;') was inserting a plain space instead of a non breaking space character.
• [#2273] The dragresizetable plugin now works in Firefox 3 as well.
• [#2254] Minor fix in FCKSelection for nodeTagName object.
• [#1614] Unified FCKConfig.FullBasePath with FCKConfig.BasePath.
• [#2127] Changed floating dialogs to use fixed positioning so that they are no longer affected by scrolling.
• [#2018] Reversed the fix for #183 which broke FCKeditorAPI's cleanup logic. A new configuration directive MsWebBrowserControlCompat has been added for those who wish to force the #183 fix to be enabled.
• [#2276] [#2279] On Opera and Firefox 3, the entire page was scrolling on ENTER.
• [#2149] CSS urls with querystring parameters were not being accepted for CSS values in the configuration file (like EditorAreaCSS).
• [#2287] On some specific cases, with Firefox 2, some extra spacing was appearing in the final HTML on posting, if inserting two successive tables.
• [#2287] Block elements (like tables or horizontal rules) will be inserted correctly now when the cursor is at the start or the end of blocks. No extra paragraphs will be included in this operation.
• [#2197] The TAB key will now have the default browser behavior if TabSpaces=0. It will move the focus out of the editor (expect on Safari).
• [#2296] Fixed permission denied error on clicking on files in the file browser.

Entire page scrolling on ENTER

This was a really annoying issue which I first noticed when I was trying out a beta version of Opera 9.5, the first version of Opera which will run FCKEditor. When you clicked the <ENTER> key on the keyboard the whole page the editor was in would scroll and the editor window itself would scroll as well. This same issue occurred in Mozilla Firefox 3 as well. Often I'm a little slow to upgrade software like FCKEditor but this was such an annoying issue that as soon as I saw they'd fixed it I installed it straight away.

Upgrading FCKEditor

As long as you haven't changed anything to any of the FCKEditor source files, upgrading should be as easy as extracting the tar.gz or zip file and replacing your existing install. I always modify the fckconfig.js and fckstyles.xml files so need to ensure I copy/merge across my changes from the old install to the new one. Often new settings are added to the new releases so it's never a good idea to simply overwrite the new file with your old one.

To see what you need to copy/merge over from your old files to your new ones, you need to use a diff program to see the differences. Then you know what to copy over, or you can use the tool to automatically merge the files. I use kdiff3, a graphical tool, which is part of KDE but which I recently discovered also contains a Windows and OS/X port so I can now use it on Windows too when I need to.

The screenshot below shows me comparing the fckconfig.js file with kdiff3 on KDE on Linux:

The old file is loaded into the left pane and the new file into the right pane (although you could of course load them the other way around). The red lines next to the scroll bar on the right side show where there are lines that differ, and the green and blue bars to the left of each pane show this also. The changes are then also highlighted.

So in the above example I can see I needed to comment out the first FCKEditor.EditorAreaCSS line and then add in my own custom line below it. Then it's just a matter of scrolling down through the files and work out what else I need to copy over.

Alternatively, you can use the Merge -> Merge Current File option from the menu and then work out the conflicts (if any) but for these files there are usually so few changes I find it faster to just copy them over manually into the new file.

Update 26 June 2008

Firefox is annoyingly very good at caching the FCKEditor stuff for some reason. I found on some of my computers/logins that even after upgrading FCKEditor hitting <enter> was still moving the webpage and editor window. To fix this you need to clear Firefox's cache. (To clear the cache, press Ctrl+Shift+Delete, make sure only the "Cache" checkbox is checked and then click the "Clear Private Data Now" button).