A couple of days ago, on February 12, 2024, Sitecore released a new Sitecore XM Cloud Pages Rich Text Editor (RTE) for Rich Text fields. In this short blog post I’ll give a quick view of how you can enable it in XM Cloud, what it offers and what it looks like.
The new rich text editor offers several new features, such as Text Alignment, Headings, the ability to add tables. You can find and replace text within the RTE & style images in a variety of new ways.
Let’s first have a look at how a Rich Text field currently, without this new RTE, looks like in Pages. So when you for example have an empty page, then in the Components tab, you’ll be able to drag and drop the Rich Text component onto a page.
So now that I’ve dragged the Rich Text component on the page, when you select it you basically can enter text, but cannot, from within Pages, make up that Rich Text with styles etc…
So in order to enable the new RTE editor in XM Cloud Pages you first of all NEED to be on at least Sitecore JSS 21.5.2 according to the XM Cloud changelog. The Sitecore JSS team however has been extremely busy and recently released a huge upgrade on Sitecore JSS, see my recent blog post:
So just upgrade to at least that version or immediately upgrade to the latest JSS version of 21.6.2, which was released like 2 days ago (not that that is mandatory for enabling the new RTE in XM Cloud Pages).
Enabling the new RTE editor needs to be done through the XM Cloud Deploy App by adding the following ENVIRONMENT variable:
- Name – PAGES_ENABLE_NEW_RTE_EDITOR
- Value – true
Below you can see how it should be configured:
So now that we have that configured, and as you can see it’s really simple to get that new RTE enabled in Pages.
When we return to the Pages editor, we now have a modern, feature-rich JavaScript text editor available for Rich Text fields.
As written above the new RTE offers several new features, such as Text Alignment, Headings, the ability to add tables etc…
Sitecore uses the popular web-based WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor called CKEditor for the new RTE.
CKEditor provides users with an easy-to-use interface for formatting and editing text content directly within web pages. It offers features such as text formatting (bold, italic, underline, etc.), font and color selection, image insertion, table creation, hyperlink insertion, and more.
And that’s the quick overview and background technology it uses.
Sitecore is constantly releasing new features on their new cloud-native, SaaS enterprise-ready CMS platform XM Cloud such as Sitecore XM Cloud Forms and now this RTE upgrade in Pages.
Checkout the XM Cloud changelog on the RTE Editor:
If you’re interested in their recent Sitecore XM Cloud Forms addition, check out my previous blog posts:
Happy Sitecore-ing! The future is composable…
–Robbert
