Usage

The application can enable TinyMCE for one form field using the widget keyword argument of Field constructors or for all textareas on a page using a view.

Using the widget

If you use the widget (recommended) you need to add some python code and possibly modify your template.

Python code

The TinyMCE widget can be enabled by setting it as the widget for a formfield. For example, to use a nice big TinyMCE widget for the content field of a flatpage form you could use the following code:

from django import forms
from django.contrib.flatpages.models import FlatPage
from tinymce.widgets import TinyMCE

class FlatPageForm(forms.ModelForm):
    ...
    content = forms.CharField(widget=TinyMCE(attrs={'cols': 80, 'rows': 30}))
    ...

    class Meta:
        model = FlatPage

The widget accepts the following extra keyword argument:

mce_attrs (default: {})
Extra TinyMCE configuration options. Options from settings.TINYMCE_DEFAULT_CONFIG (see Configuration) are applied first and can be overridden. Python types are automatically converted to Javascript types, using standard JSON encoding. For example, to disable word wrapping you would include 'nowrap': True.

The tinymce application adds one TinyMCE configuration option that can be set using mce_attrs (it is not useful as a default configuration):

content_language (default: django.utils.translation.get_language_code())
The language of the widget content. Will be used to set the language, directionality and spellchecker_languages configuration options of the TinyMCE editor. It may be different from the interface language, which defaults to the current Django language and can be changed using the language configuration option in mce_attrs)

Templates

The widget requires a link to the TinyMCE javascript code. The django.contrib.admin templates do this for you automatically, so if you are just using tinymce in admin forms then you are done. In your own templates containing a TinyMCE widget you must add the following to the HTML HEAD section (assuming you named your form ‘form’):

<head>
    ...
    {{ form.media }}
</head>

See also the section of form media in the Django documentation.

The HTMLField model field type

For lazy developers the tinymce application also contains a model field type for storing HTML. It uses the TinyMCE widget to render its form field. In this example, the admin will render the my_field field using the TinyMCE widget:

from django.db import models
from tinymce import models as tinymce_models

class MyModel(models.Model):
    my_field = tinymce_models.HTMLField()

In all other regards, HTMLField behaves just like the standard Django TextField field type.

Using the view

If you cannot or will not change the widget on a form you can also use the tinymce-js named view to convert some or all textfields on a page to TinyMCE editors. On the template of the page, add the following lines to the HEAD element:

{% load url from future %}
<script type="text/javascript" src="{{ MEDIA_URL }}js/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="{% url "tinymce-js" "NAME" %}"></script>

The NAME argument allows you to create multiple TinyMCE configurations. Now create a template containing the Javascript initialization code. It should be placed in the template path as NAME/tinymce_textareas.js or tinymce/NAME_textareas.js.

Example:

tinyMCE.init({
    mode: "textareas",
    theme: "advanced",
    plugins: "spellchecker,directionality,paste,searchreplace",
    language: "{{ language }}",
    directionality: "{{ directionality }}",
    spellchecker_languages : "{{ spellchecker_languages }}",
    spellchecker_rpc_url : "{{ spellchecker_rpc_url }}"
});

This example also shows the variables you can use in the template. The language variables are based on the current Django language. If the content language is different from the interface language use the tinymce-js-lang view which takes a language (LANG_CODE) argument:

{% load url from future %}
<script type="text/javascript" src="{% url "tinymce-js-lang" "NAME","LANG_CODE" %}"></script>

The TinyMCE preview button

TinyMCE contains a preview plugin that can be used to allow the user to view the contents of the editor in the website context. The tinymce application provides a view and a template tag to make supporting this plugin easier. To use it point the plugin_preview_pageurl configuration to the view named tinymce-preview:

from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
widget = TinyMCE(mce_attrs={'plugin_preview_pageurl': reverse('tinymce-preview', "NAME")})

The view named by tinymce-preview looks for a template named either tinymce/NAME_preview.html or NAME/tinymce_preview.html. The template accesses the content of the TinyMCE editor by using the tinymce_preview tag:

{% load tinymce_tags %}
<html>
<head>
...
{% tinymce_preview "preview-content" %}
</head>
<body>
...
<div id="preview-content"></div>
...

With this template code the tekst inside the HTML element with id preview-content will be replace by the content of the TinyMCE editor.

Custom buttons and plugins

You can use TinyMCE setup method to call custom JavaScript functions after all TinyMCE files are loaded but before the editor instance is rendered on the page. This is suitable to add custom buttons, menu entries or events to TinyMCE.

For example, to add custom button with simple functionality, add setup entry to your TINYMCE_PROFILE:

TINYMCE_PROFILE = {
    ...
    'setup': 'addCustomButtons',
    ...
}

Then load JavaScript file containing addCustomButtons function using Django ModelAdmin assets:

class ArticleAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
  class Media:
      js = ("tinymce_custom_buttons.js",)

tinymce_custom_buttons.js can look like this:

function addCustomButtons(editor) {
  // This function replaces all whitespaces in selected area with dashes
  var whitespace_replace = function () {
      var selected_content = editor.selection.getContent();
      var replaced_content = selected_content.replace(/ /g, "-");
      editor.selection.setContent(replaced_content);
      editor.undoManager.add();
  };
  // Adding button to editor
  editor.addButton('test-button', {
      tooltip: 'Replace whitespaces with dashes',
      icon: 'blockquote',
      onclick: whitespace_replace
  });
  // Adding menu item to editor
  editor.addMenuItem('test-button', {
      context: 'format',
      text: 'Replace whitespaces with dashes',
      icon: 'blockquote',
      onclick: whitespace_replace
  });
}

Note: for custom button to appear in editor toolbar you must explicitly append it to TINYMCE_PROFILE toolbar entry:

TINYMCE_PROFILE = {
    ...
    'setup': 'addCustomButtons',
    'toolbar': '... test-button',
    ...
}

For more information on custom buttons see official TinyMCE documentation.

If you want to implement more complex behavior (i.e. load auxiliary resources like button icons or js libraries) consider writing a TinyMCE plugin. TinyMCE plugins are small JavaScript files containing tinymce.PluginManager.add function (see TinyMCE plugin tutorial for more information). Then writing a plugin, place it in tinymce/plugins/<your_plugin_name>/plugin.min.js in one of your STATICFILES_DIRS, then load the plugin with TINYMCE_PROFILE (you still have to explicitly add button to a toolbar):

TINYMCE_PROFILE = {
    ...
    'plugins': '... example',
    'toolbar': '... example',
    ...
}

(don’t forget to run python manage.py collectstatic if you are not using built-it Django development server). The button should appear on a toolbar.

Note: ensure you use unique plugin name. Overlapping of plugin names results in undefined behavior (see list of TinyMCE built-in plugins).