Future plans for SimpleUploads

I've wanted to write this post for a long time, but I'm usually a little busy and things didn't look to be quite ready, and it's better to not scare people out if it isn't needed.

The future of SimpleUploads

If you follow the development of CKEditor you should know that for a long time they have been planning to add support of image pasting as well as drag and drop in the next version of CKEditor. Initially it was planned for CKEditor 4.4, but soon they realized that it required much more work than originally planned so it was delayed for the next version. CKeditor 4.5 was supposed to be released next week, but they have announced that the whole release will be delayed by an unspecified amount of time.

I can't state how the planned features will work, as it seems that at the moment it's still a work in progress, but I really expect that their code will make quite hard the upgrade of my SimpleUploads plugin to keep all its current features because the browsers are quite frail in these kind of operations. The correct solution would be to use the new APIs that they are creating (at least I hope that they provide some API) and add the missing bits to provide again everything that they have skipped.

But the fact is that like any previous release I expect that it will wreak havoc with my code and it will require lots of changes and some parts might be incompatible with their code so this will require a compromise and I will work to try to bring everything back to work as soon as I can.

Of course such rewrite will be incompatible with the previous versions of CKEditor, and I plan to provide two versions from that point:

• The current one, compatible with CKeditor up to 4.5
• Next version, only for CKeditor >= 4.5

The current version is highly polished and I will keep on working on fixing any minor issues that might appear. The focus of my work will be the next version in order to make it work at least as good as the current one.

Currently drag&drop and pasting are just only a part of the whole feature set of SimpleUploads, so adding them to CKEditor doesn't really mean an end to this plugin, only an adjustment about which parts are handled in CKEditor and how to make the whole upload experience as easy and simple as possible for the end user.

What does this means to you?

If you're currently using my plugin, you should delay the upgrade to CKEditor 4.5 until I release something that works at least with the features that you need. If you don't plan to upgrade to CKEditor 4.5 as soon as it's released then this shouldn't be a problem, afterwards, please check if I've managed to fix everything besides whatever I might write as required changes for the upgrade.

If you're interested only about the drag and drop or paste of images into CKEditor and you're OK with waiting a little while and then using that CKEditor version, then you shouldn't buy my SimpleUploads plugin . Just keep on waiting and you'll be ready to go.

Of course, waiting might not be an option for you as you need a solution right now, or you are already using a version of CKEditor and you don't plan an upgrade in the foreseeable future, or more probably, you want more features than those available in the plan CKEditor (like single click uploads). In that case you can use my plugin if you're willing to pay just a little money; if you want a free solution my plugin shouldn't be a concern to you: I don't have any plan to release it for free or to drop it. People have paid for it and I will try to support it for as long as I can.

Please, don't write me in a hurry as soon as CKEditor 4.5 is released, this is my warning that I expect things to break and I will try to put everything into working form again, but I think that it might take at least two weeks until I'm able to release a new version that works and maybe a whole month at least to keep on fixing all the breakage caused by the changes. I have a life and a full time job and even if I don't waste my time with Ingress, time passes flying by and I can't sit the whole day working on these plugins unless I'm on vacation.