How Neos CMS saved time and boosted productivity with CKEditor

Neos CMS is an innovative open source content management system committed to being user-friendly. The core idea behind the project is to make editing websites fun again. Neos’ goal is to allow editors to edit content as seamlessly as possible while still retaining its structure. The structured content can be later on rendered and processed in any possible way. We contribute to Neos’ success by providing the most modern editor for content management systems available on the market.

Challenge: Needing customizability

Neos’ team was using a different type of editor which did not meet their expectations. For one, it didn’t have an npm module. It was a one-size-fits-all solution with lots of functionalities that they had no need for, like a user interface. But they had to import all of them. Dmitri Pisarev, Neos CMS Team Member, recalls this period as “constant fighting with the code”. “We tried to disable the user interface but we didn’t fully succeed. There were still some ugly parts of it which we couldn’t remove at all. What we wanted was to have modularity and get only what we ask for without getting everything else included.” Dmitri Pisarev, Neos CMS Team Member, recalls this period as “constant fighting with the code”.

Solution: An editor with customized experiences

Neos’ team found a solution in CKEditor 5, which provided them with a rich-text editing framework to create custom experiences with. The modular nature of CKEditor 5 means they Neos got what they asked for with their software - nothing more, nothing less.

“The integration was extremely lean,” says Pisarev. “We didn’t have to override any code. We just wrote a few plugins that were missing in the editor itself and enabled some specific plugins that we needed for our purposes. We made it completely customizable for the integrator to choose which plugins he needs for a particular section. Each section is a new instance of the editor. For example, the title section does not even have bold and italic plugins, as we wanted it this way. If you paste something there from any source, it gets automatically stripped from all the formatting. That’s really amazing.”

Result: Increased efficiency

“Working with CKEditor 5 was so smooth and effortless that it saved us a lot of time,” says Pisarev. “It’s the first rich text editor that I was able to understand how it works. We didn’t need to fight with a jungle of messy code that you are not able to fix yourself. It was a real productivity boost for us!”

The Neos team was finally able to unlock resources and focus on user-facing features. They rewrote the link editor from scratch, improved its Paste from Word feature, and made many other improvements. All of which benefit their users.