This tutorial will show you how to use the Pogostick Yii Extension Library to make an HTML TEXTAREA input element into a full-fledged WYSIWYG editor pretty much with very little code.

This is done using a wrapper for the very excellent markItUp! jQuery widget.

I assume you have installed the Pogostick Yii Extension Library. If you haven't please do so before you run the code below. It won't work otherwise.

Configuration ¶

1. skinToUse
2. multiUseClass
3. settingsToUse
4. setToUse

There is no configuration necessary after you have installed the psYiiExtensions library and set your path alias in your main.php configuration file.

Step 1: Create a TEXTAREA ¶

You must create a TEXTAREA somewhere in your HTML to use the markItUp! widget. Give your TEXTAREA a unique id:

    <textarea id='myTextArea' class='html' rows='10' cols='50'></textarea>

Step 2: Create your widget ¶

Now that your form contains a TEXTAREA with a unique id ('myTextArea'), we can create our widget. This can be placed anywhere within your view, but put it at the top somewhere for easy maintenance.

CPSMarkItUpWidget::create( array( 'id' => 'myTextArea' ) );

Step 3: Enjoy! ¶

That's all there is to it! When you refresh your page, you should see a full WYSIWYG text editor where your TEXTAREA was!

Options ¶

Aside from the 'id' and 'name' parameters (which are in the core CWidget class, there are a four additional options for this widget.

skinToUse ¶

The skin to use for displaying the markItUp editor. You can download skins from the markItUp web site. I have included the markItUp and simple skins with the default installation. Just place your downloaded skins in the /external/jquery-plugins/markitup/skins directory under where you installed the psYiiExtensions.

multiUseClass ¶

If this option is set with a valid CSS class name, all TEXTAREAs on your page that have this CSS class applied to them will be converted into markItUp areas. Pretty neat eh?

settingsToUse ¶

The NAME of the JSON settings array included with the "set". Defaults to 'mySettings'. markItUp is quite configurable and can be used to edit a variety of markup languages. To tell it how to parse and display, a settings file is used. In this file is a JSON array (which is named) of configuration options. The default name for the array variable is 'mySettings'. You can download additional settings files from the markItUp web site.

setToUse ¶

The parse set to use. Defaults to 'html'. Again, markItUp is quite flexible and can parse a variety of formats. You can download additional parse-sets files from the markItUp web site.

Roadmap ¶

I'm not planning on doing to much with this unless the options change or something breaks. However, I am waiting for the author to update the widget to use the jQuery UI themes. I will update this page once that occurs.