Ok, I finally did it. I actually read through the manual for the Rich Text Editor in TYPO3. For the longest time I have just been getting by using the default settings plus a few modifications I made through dabbling with the editor. However, more and more, I was feeling the need to get a deeper understanding of how to configure the editor for specific sites and individual users.
I am not yet an RTE expert for it is a very powerful and flexible extension with a lot of configuration options, but I do know more than I did a few days ago. I hope to share some specific tips in future posts, but for now let me give some basic information.
The editor has 3 default configurations (typical, minimal and demo). You can change these by going to the extension manager and clicking on "htmlArea RTE" in the list of loaded extensions. This will take you to a page with several configuration options with one of those being the default configurations. Stay away from "Minimal" until you really know what you are doing. If you want most of the features of the RTE activated for experimentation then select "Demo," but this is not recommended for production environments. I use "Typical" for my work and experimentation.
These default configurations supply a base configuration code for all pages and all users in your installation. You can then adjust for the site as a whole, for specific sections of the site or for individual users and groups. You can see the code for each of these configurations in the latter part of the RTE manual which is a great section for understanding how to construct code for the RTE and how to override particular settings.
Keep in mind that, unlike TT News or other FE extensions, your configuration code for the editor does not go into the TSsetup field of a typoscript template. Rather you enter code into the TSconfig fields of your pages, users and groups (Page TSconfig and User TSconfig).
The first area to enter code is in the TSconfig field of the root page of your site. This where you adjust the settings for all pages in the site and for all users. Take, for instance, the code:
RTE.default.contentCSS = fileadmin/styles/rte.css
This would have the styles from "rte.css" show up in the editor. If a certain section of the site needed a different selection of styles, at the top level page of that section you could enter:
RTE.default.contentCSS = fileadmin/styles/new_section_rte.css
and from that point on down in the page tree the RTE would use the styles in "new_section_rte.css."
Of course, there is much more to configuring the styles in the RTE (I will cover that in another post), but this is to demonstrate how you can adjust the RTE for different parts of the site.
As for adjusting the editor for individual users and groups, let's say that you normally want the RTE is to have all buttons available to a user but there is one user group called "Basic Editor" which you only want to access the "bold" and "italic" buttons.
In the TSconfig field of your root page enter:
RTE.default.showButtons = *
In the TSconfig field of a user group called "Basic Editor" enter:
options.RTEkeyList = bold, italic
All users will then see all buttons in the RTE unless you make them part of the "Basic Editor" group in which they will only have access to bold and italic. There is a section for both Page TSconfig and User TSconfig in the RTE manual which details the code that can be used in each.
I will try to delve into configuration for specific needs in future posts (for instance, how to add custom styles in the the text and paragraph drop down menus). However, play around with the code in the manual and after awhile it will start to make sense and open up all kinds of possiblities.