Replace textarea with rich text editor in Django A

Question

I would like to know the best way to replace a standard textarea field with a rich text editor in Django Admin?

Answer 1

At the date of the post and the answers TinyMCE was quite popular (as it probably remains today). But after some time ckeditor has appeared and many consider that a better alternative, including many SO users:

Compare TinyMCE and CKeditor for a Wiki

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/tinymce-vs-ckeditor

There is also a 2013 review of WISIWYG editors with Django in Russian:

http://habrahabr.ru/company/htdt/blog/202782/

Answer 2

class KindEditor(forms.Textarea):
    class Media:
        css ={
            'all':(settings.STATIC_ROOT + 'editor/themes/default/default.css',)
        }
        js = (settings.STATIC_ROOT + 'editor/kindeditor-min.js',settings.STATIC_ROOT + 'editor/lang/zh_CN.js',)
    def __init__(self):
        attrs = {}
        attrs['rel'] = 'kind'
        super(KindEditor, self).__init__(attrs)


class NewsAdminForm(forms.ModelForm):
    pass

    class Meta:
        model = News
        widgets = {
            'body':KindEditor()
        }

class NewsAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    form = NewsAdminForm


admin.site.register(News, NewsAdmin)

Answer 3

I'd say: define your own ModelAdmin class and overwrite the widget used for particular field, like:

class ArticleAdminModelForm(forms.ModelForm):
    description = forms.CharField(widget=widgets.AdminWYMEditor)

    class Meta:
        model = models.Article

(AdminWYMEditor is a forms.Textarea subclass that adds WYMEditor with configuration specific to Django admin app).

See this blog post by Jannis Leidel to see how this widget can be implemented.

Answer 4

Take a look on this snippet - basic idea is to include custom JS in your admin definitions which will replace standard text areas with rich-text editor.

For jQuery/FCKEditor such JS could look like that:

$(document).ready(function() {
    $("textarea").each(function(n, obj) {
        fck = new FCKeditor(obj.id) ;
            fck.BasePath = "/admin-media/fckeditor/" ;
            fck.ReplaceTextarea() ;
    });
});

Answer 5

There's an add-on Django application to provide TinyMCE support for Django admin forms without having to muck around with admin templates or Django newform internals.

Answer 6

Ok, to update a little this post, I would say that the easiest way to implement TinyMCE is to use the django-tinymce app. You must also download the JS files from the TinyMCE page. I got some errors with the django intenationalization, but downloading the laguage packs from the TinyMCE must be enough.