django-ckeditor

django-ckeditor makes it easy to use CKEditor with your Django 1.3+ text fields.

Setup

Install the package with pip and Mercurial or git:

pip install -e hg+http://bitbucket.org/dwaiter/django-ckeditor#egg=django-ckeditor

# or ...

pip install -e git://github.com/dwaiter/django-ckeditor.git#egg=django-ckeditor

Add ckeditor to your INSTALLED_APPS.

Add a CKEDITOR_CONFIGS variable to your settings.py with at least a default config:

CKEDITOR_CONFIGS = {
    'default': {
        'toolbar': [
            [      'Undo', 'Redo',
              '-', 'Bold', 'Italic', 'Underline',
              '-', 'Link', 'Unlink', 'Anchor',
              '-', 'Format',
              '-', 'SpellChecker', 'Scayt',
              '-', 'Maximize',
            ],
            [      'HorizontalRule',
              '-', 'Table',
              '-', 'BulletedList', 'NumberedList',
              '-', 'Cut','Copy','Paste','PasteText','PasteFromWord',
              '-', 'SpecialChar',
              '-', 'Source',
              '-', 'About',
            ]
        ],
        'width': 840,
        'height': 300,
        'toolbarCanCollapse': False,
    }
}

Collect the static files:

python manage.py collectstatic

Usage

To use CKEditor for a particular field in a form, set its widget to an instance of ckeditor.widgets.CKEditor like this:

from ckeditor.widgets import CKEditor

class SampleForm(forms.Form):
    body = forms.CharField(
        widget=CKEditor()
    )

As a shortcut you can use a ckeditor.fields.HTMLField instead of django.db.models.TextField in a model to automatically use the CKEditor widget, like so:

from django.db import models
from ckeditor.fields import HTMLField

class Sample(models.Model):
    # This will use a normal <textarea> when rendered in a (Model)Form
    plain_body = models.TextField(blank=True, verbose_name='plain version')
    
    # This will use CKEditor when rendered in a (Model)Form
    html_body = HTMLField(blank=True, verbose_name='HTML version')

Custom Configurations

Sometimes it's nice to be able to configure each CKEditor widget separately. For example, you may want one field to have all the buttons on the toolbar, but another field to only show bold/italic/underline buttons.

To do this, add additional configurations to your CKEDITOR_CONFIGS setting like this:

CKEDITOR_CONFIGS = {
    'default': {
        'toolbar': [
            [      'Undo', 'Redo',
              '-', 'Bold', 'Italic', 'Underline',
              '-', 'Link', 'Unlink', 'Anchor',
              '-', 'Format',
              '-', 'SpellChecker', 'Scayt',
              '-', 'Maximize',
            ],
        ],
        'width': 840,
        'height': 300,
        'toolbarCanCollapse': False,
    },
    
    'simple_toolbar': {
        'toolbar': [
            [ 'Bold', 'Italic', 'Underline' ],
        ],
        'width': 840,
        'height': 300,
    },
}

When setting up the CKEditor widget in your Form class you can pass a ckeditor_config keyword argument to specify the config to use:

class BlogPostForm(forms.Form):
    title = forms.CharField()
    
    # This field will render as a CKEditor with the 'simple_toolbar' config.
    subtitle = forms.CharField(
        widget=CKEditor(ckeditor_config='simple_toolbar')
    )
    
    # This field will render as a CKEditor with the 'default' config.
    body = forms.CharField(
        widget=CKEditor()
    )

You cannot use the HTMLField shortcut if you want to specify a custom config -- you must create a form.

Media URL

You can also customize the URL that django-ckeditor will look for the CKEditor media at by adding CKEDITOR_MEDIA_URL to your settings.py file like this:

CKEDITOR_MEDIA_URL = '/static/third-party/ckeditor'

The default value is MEDIA_URL/ckeditor which is why the setup instructions tell you to symlink it into your media/ directory.