Customizing the RadEditor in DotNetNuke

The default editor in DotNetNuke has been the RadEditor (by telerik) since version 05.02.00.  This editor is very robust and feature rich, including things like spell check, XHTML formatting, and many other advanced features.  It is considered by many to be the best web-based WYSIWYG HTML editor available.  I tend to agree.

With all of those features, it is very possible that some less advanced end-users might not enjoy the toolbar in its default state.  For example, you might want to remove functionality from the default toolbar.  Imagine removing advanced functionality like image maps, code validator, flash manager, etc. 

The editor allows you to customize this user experience very easily.  Unfortunately, there isn’t an option to do this through any of the administration of the website at this time.  You have to have file-level access to modify the files.

DotNetNuke ships with two tool configuration files.  They are:

• ~/Providers/HtmlEditorProviders/Telerik/Config/ToolsDefault.xml
• ~/Providers/HtmlEditorProviders/Telerik/Config/ToolsMinimal.xml

The editor uses the “ToolsDefault.xml” file, but you can easily change that by making a single change in the web.config file of your DNN site.

Find the line in your web.config that begins with and change the value for the toolsFile attribute to the new XML tools file.  If you simply change from the ToolsDefault file to the ToolsMinimal file, you will see a significant difference in the two screen shots below.

Here is the line of code you’d be changing in the web.config, before and after.

<add name="TelerikEditorProvider" 

    type="DotNetNuke.HtmlEditor.TelerikEditorProvider.EditorProvider, DotNetNuke.HtmlEditor.TelerikEditorProvider" 

    providerPath="~/Providers/HtmlEditorProviders/Telerik/" 

    toolsFile="~/Providers/HtmlEditorProviders/Telerik/Config/ToolsDefault.xml" 

    configFile="~/Providers/HtmlEditorProviders/Telerik/Config/ConfigDefault.xml" 

    FilterHostExtensions="True" />

<add name="TelerikEditorProvider" 

    type="DotNetNuke.HtmlEditor.TelerikEditorProvider.EditorProvider, DotNetNuke.HtmlEditor.TelerikEditorProvider" 

    providerPath="~/Providers/HtmlEditorProviders/Telerik/" 

    toolsFile="~/Providers/HtmlEditorProviders/Telerik/Config/ToolsMinimal.xml" 

    configFile="~/Providers/HtmlEditorProviders/Telerik/Config/ConfigDefault.xml" 

    FilterHostExtensions="True" />

Unfortunately, this change occurs for the entire installation of DNN right now.  So, plan how you minimize your toolbars accordingly.