Question

I’m new to CKEditor, writing my first plugin and i just can’t find the answer to this one anywhere.

I have a plugin which creates a div element in the source containing just the text !!!!!NEWSTABLE!!!!!. The class attribute is set to newsDiv. On the WYSIWYG editor, I just want it to display a fake placeholder element. This works fine, the problem is that when I switch back to WYSIWYG mode after having been in source mode, it inserts blank paragraph tags above and below the inserted div.
Switching enterMode to CKEDITOR.ENTER_BR fixes this, but I would still like the enter key to make a paragraph rather than a break-space.

My plugin code (inspired by the flash plugin source code) is as follows:

(function() {

    function isNewsEmbed(element) {
        return (element.attributes.class == 'newsDiv');
    }

    function createFakeElement(editor, realElement) {
        return editor.createFakeParserElement(realElement, 'cke_news', 'div', false);
    }

    CKEDITOR.plugins.add('newsTable', {
        init: function(editor) {
            var pluginName = 'newsTable';
            editor.ui.addButton('NewsTable', {
                label: 'Add News Section',
                icon: 'https://d26h7uo9h7bqnn.cloudfront.net/famfamfam/newspaper_add.png',
                command: pluginName
            });
            editor.addCommand(pluginName, {
                exec: function(editor) {
                    var node = new CKEDITOR.dom.element('div');
                    node.setAttribute('class', 'newsDiv');
                    node.setHtml('!!!!!NEWSTABLE!!!!!');
                    elem = editor.createFakeElement(node, 'cke_news', 'div', false)
                    editor.insertElement(elem);
                }
            }); 
            var css = 'img.cke_news{' +
                'background-image: url(' + CKEDITOR.getUrl( this.path + 'images/placeholder.png' ) + ');' +
                'background-position: center center;' +
                'background-repeat: no-repeat;' +
                'border: 1px solid #a9a9a9;' +
                'width: 80px;' +
                'height: 80px;' +
            '}';
            editor.addCss(css);
        },
        afterInit: function(editor) {
            var dataProcessor = editor.dataProcessor,
                dataFilter = dataProcessor && dataProcessor.dataFilter;

            if (dataFilter) {
                dataFilter.addRules({
                    elements: {
                        'div' : function( element ) {
                            var attributes = element.attributes,
                            classId = attributes.classid && String( attributes.classid ).toLowerCase();
                            if (!classId && isNewsEmbed(element)){
                                return createFakeElement( editor, element );
                            }
                            return null;
                        }
                    }
                });
            }
        },
        requires : [ 'fakeobjects' ]
    });

})();

After pressing the button that activates this plugin, I press ‘Source’ and it is as expected…

<p>
<div class="newsDiv">
    !!!!!NEWSTABLE!!!!!</div>
</p>

However, if from there ones goes into WYSIWYG mode and back again (without doing anything else) the code has changed to the following, which i dont expect.

<p>
&nbsp;</p>
<div class="newsDiv">
!!!!!NEWSTABLE!!!!!</div>
<p>
&nbsp;</p>

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

I know it’s a rather late answer (I was searching to solve another issue, and stumbled upon this question), but the reason you can’t do this, is because both the <p> and <div> tags are “block level” elements, and you can’t put a block level element in another block level element. (It’s just invalid HTML).

CKEditor automatically repairs this, in the way you’re seeing above.