It’s about time to give you a progress report on development of SPAW Editor v.2 .NET Edition and I’m happy to report that it was rendered via ASP .NET for the first time today:

There are still quite a few important things to do: dialogs (especially File Manager), wrapping it all nicely in .NET control, etc. but the most important core development/porting is complete.

Hopefully we’ll be able to release a usable beta in several weeks. And among other things this also means that you have that much time (couple of weeks) to secure the enterprise license at a ridiculous price of 100 euros (normal price is 250).

We are starting development of SPAW Editor v.2 .NET edition. First public release is expected by the end of summer/early autumn 2007.

In the mean time you can pre-order v.2 with a huge discount of 60% for the enterprise license. You will get unlimited license for v.1 + free upgrade to v.2 when it’s released + free upgrades to all 2.x releases. And finally you will support the development of .NET Edition v.2!

And now some technical information…

v.2 unlike v.1 will be developed as custom control targeted at .NET framework 2.0/3.0. We will make a reasonable effort to make it .NET 1.x compatible, but no promises at this point. Design time support for Visual Studio 2005 will be included.

Functionally .NET Edition will be identical (+/- some platform specific features) to the PHP Edition. Once stable .NET version is released both versions will be developed/updated simultanously. So, if you are wondering what would it be able to do, check out PHP Edition demo.

We’ve started a special thread for all things related to v.2 .NET edition so, in case you have any thoughts on the matter we would really like to hear them.

Your support and feedback are highly appreciated!

We have just released version 2.0.5 of SPAW Editor PHP Edition. This is a “wide” release of version 2.0.5 beta which introduced Safari 3 support a couple of weeks ago.

In addition to new features in 2.0.5 beta this release fixes a bug in dialogs with RTL languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. In case you’re already using v.2.0.5 beta and don’t use RTL languages, there’s no need to upgrade.

v.2.0.5 is availabe for immediate download through our download page.

Here is a complete list of changes in versions 2.0.5 beta and 2.0.5:

• FEATURE ADDED: support for Safari 3 browser on OS X and Windows
• BUGFIX: absolute URLs were not stripped in XHTML module
• BUGFIX: XHTML rendering: only the first instance of & in href and src attributes was converted to &
• BUGFIX: text direction wasn’t set in dialogs when using RTL languages like Hebrew and Arabic

Next week will be the last one when you can buy “Single site” licenses for the old 20 Euro price and “Enterprise” licenses with 51 Euro discount. The offer expires on July 1, 2007.

So, if you were planning to buy one of these licenses don’t miss this opportunity. Head straight to our purchase page for details and purchase links.

We have released a beta version of SPAW Editor PHP Edition with Safari 3 support. Default Safari 2 installations have sort of retarded support for required functionality (users had to upgrade to nightly builds of WebKit for it to work normally) so we decided to show normal textareas to Safari2 users rather than semi-working WYSIWYG.

This release is marked BETA for 2 reasons:

1. Obviously it’s a first release with Safari support and we are not 100% sure this will work as expected for everyone. But aside from some small changes in shared code all other browsers should behave the same way (with 2 bugs fixed and hopefully none added) as 2.0.4.1. So, you can install this beta on your production sites if you don’t care about Safari
2. I’m going on a 2 week semi-vacation/family business this weekend and I didn’t want to make a “wide” release and leave (in case something goes wrong). This blog is the only place where 2.0.5 is announced and I wont update download links on the main site until I come back.

Ok. Enough talking and let’s get back to business. Grab 2.0.5 beta directly from sourceforge.net. Your feedback either here or in the forums is highly appreciated (especially if you are a Safari user)

P.S.: I’ll be in Germany for the next week or two. So, in case you live in Heidelberg/Mannheim area and would like to grab a beer or something drop me a line at alan@solmetra.lt (keep in mind that I don’t speak German)

A couple of days ago one new user in our forums started asking some questions. These questions were legitimate but he included huge banner for some Star Wars fansite or something (hope it wasn’t some trojan link) in his signature. I asked him not to use this signature but got no reply. He asked more questions, all legit and I replied to some of them. But he was asking them all over the place: in v.2 forum, in v.1 forum, in .NET forum. Well, I thought, maybe the guy is a huge SPAW fan and tries to use it everywhere

But today his post used a standard spam subject (like “enlarge your…”) but inside there was a legitimate question. After some thinking I tried searching for complete sentence from his post and voila - his posts were just copies of some random old posts combined with subjects from other posts (I think). The problem of the bot was that it most likely used a subject of a simplier old-school spam message and it gave him away. Otherwise I’d read and answer his questions for who knows how many more days? months? years?

Anyway while antispam technologies evolve spamming technologies evolve too and normal people waste more and more time on spam. Like I do writing this and you reading

We have just published a plugin which hooks up to the paste event in Internet Explorer and (depending on cofiguration) cleans content of the clipboard before pasting it into editing area. It uses the same cleanup function as “Clean HTML” button in the core.

Note that it works in Internet Explorer only (other browsers don’t have events for paste) and requires SPAW Editor version 2.0.4 or higher.

You can download the plugin by clicking here.

P.S.: Development of this plugin was sponsored by Erik Hes of www.hestec.nl. Thanks, Erik!

As you can see on the screenshot we already have a version of SPAW Editor PHP Edition v.2 working on Safari 3 on Mac OS X (and Windows too).

We are going to test it for a couple more days and, if no serious issues come up (knocks on wood), release it as a beta next week.

If anyone knows exact Safari or WebKit build number when “normal” support for required functionality was implemented, please, let us know. At this point we’ve set it to work on Safari with build number higher than 500. Standard Safari 2 installation found on OS X 10.4.x Tiger doesn’t fully work so we decided to render simple textareas in it rather than provide half-working WYSIWYG as some of the competitors did.

Apple has released a public beta version of Safari 3 for Windows. This brings us one more step closer to SPAW Editor working in Safari.

As reported earlier there was quite an ugly bug in XHTML rendering engine in version 2.0.4 where closing quotes on src and href attributes were missing. So we’ve made a quick bugfix release which solves that bug. Both full version and upgrade (which is only one javascript file) are available for download through our download page.

We are sorry for inconvinience and would like to thank user vwessel who discovered the bug and reported it in our forum