Abandon TinyMCE in News

1 Reasons to Abandon Feature

If the TinyMCE editor is activated in the administartion, it is automatically activated for writing news entries, even if there are no further settings to configure it.

Unfortunately the Tiny editor is not very well maintained in ILIAS and there is no real concept on how to securily output escape this kind of content. Using the HTML purifier only for input validation does not seem to be secure enough. And using it for every rendering of every single news items seems to be overkill for this kind of feature.

Since the introduction of the Timeline feature, it seems to be common to give learners permission to write news, so this feature is not so much limited on institutional staff like tutors and admins, which increases security risks even more.

Newline-to-break will of course be kept, but if any other formatting features should be kept, a simple and secure markdown output rendering would be highly welcome and could be intergrated into the news.

2 Technical Information

No technical issues.

3 Contact

• Author of the Request: Killing, Alexander [alex]
• Maintainer: Killing, Alexander [alex]
• Implementation of the feature is done by: {The maintainer must add the name of the implementing developer.}

4 Funding

Removing the feature from the ILIAS code base might need funding. If you are interest in funding this request, please add your name and institution to this list.

• ...

5 Discussion

Use the following discussion section to express your objections against this request or your consent to get rid of this feature.

Kergomard, Stephan [skergomard], 14 MAY 2021: I'm very much in favour of removing TinyMCE whereever possible, but I'm afraid that we would loose quite some functionality here (as well as in : Abandon TinyMCE formattings in Exercise). Wouldn't it be an option to introduce the ILIAS Page Editor for editing? Funding would surely be required, but it would give us a testbed for other places in ILIAS. I also believe that markdown is not an option for learner facing inputs.

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], 17 MAY 2021 : We highly appreciate this suggestion and abandon the TinyMCE support in News with ILIAS 8.

6 Implementation

Please note that HTML in new or edited old entries will not work anymore.

Removed Testcases

The following testcases have been removed from Testrail or modified because the feature is no longer part of the ILIAS core.

• {Test case number linked to Testrail} : {test case title}

Approval

Approved at 18 May 2021 by Killing, Alexander [alex].