Aloha has been released under AGPL3. Compatibility with IKS license criteria is under discussion.
The Aloha Editor provides a new way to edit content, and was concepted and developed by Gentics Software GmbH beginning in 2010, and was first presented to public at the UXCE10 by Laurin Herlt and Haymo Meran. The idea: Edit content without forms, iframes or a backend. Edit it right in place.
It can be the framework and technologie of choice to implement semantic content editing usecases.
Compensate missing specification in HTML5
HTML5 defines a way to edit content without the use of forms or iframes (set contentEditable=true to any DOM element). Unfortunately the HTML5 standard DOES NOT specify in detail, how the browser should handle user interactions (selections, enter in/before/after specific dom elments, ...). Therefore browsers support different sets of features. Aloha is an open implementation, to standardize the browser behaviour, beyond the HTML5 specification.
While it is necessary to deal with browser bugs it is also necessary to correct such specification flaws. This issue therefore has been added to the W3C bug database: HTML5 spec bug 10013.
Easy to use UI elements exist to standardizes the UI of apps and plugins using the Aloha Editor:
- Ribbon for notifications (synchronous and asynchronous) and actions.
- Buttons to apply something to a selection or insert something at the cursor position,
- Sidebar to select ressources, edit properties, provide related information.
The editor should minimize the amount of necessary user interactions to do semantic content editing. Load fast, and respond fast.
- the editor itself comes without any UI, it integrates into content display layer seamlessly, using HTML5 technology.
- it's light weight, has a small core. nearly everything is done through plugins.
- it supports modern browsers only (Firefox 3+, Safari, IE7+, Chrome, no IE6).
- has been developed from scratch.
Aloha Editor comes without any storage or backend. so you'll need to store the edited content to your backend/storage API. example implementations exist.
Source Code, Community, Contribution
Aloha has been released on July 15, 2010: http://aloha-editor.com/