Wow, it must be a cold day in heck! Because I think––for the first time ever––I kind of disagree with DrByte.
When it comes to websites, I am almost always for trimming fat. The leaner, the better. But I draw a line at user experience, both front end and back.
After a ZC is up, template added, mods installed, and site configured, then comes the part that matters most: content (prod pages, ez pages, etc, etc, etc).
Having a solid wysiwyg with a strong selections of features is extremely helpful. Many of those (probably most) adding content are NOT programmers. Or, at least not strong enough to code a page from scratch. And really... why should anybody do that (talk about a waste of time!)? Having a wysiwyg built in to the admin area (CKEditor) makes life SO MUCH EASIER!
It's not just convenient, but I think it's actually critical. Yes, I could force my clients to go out buy a copy of Dreamweaver or some other such. But that's a pretty silly overkill if all they need is a wysiwyg editor. Unfortunately, I can't hand a site back to a client without providing a wysiwyg solution I can train them to use. And that solution needs to have any basic feature that the client may require.
Let me point two things out (to see if it sways your opinion any, DrB):
First, in years past, I'm pretty sure the ZC CKEditor mod did include Full package (it's possible I'm thinking of another editor like TinyMCE or something, but I don't think so). When you have the Full CK, there is a button on the menu bar that allows you to configure what appears on that bar. In other words, you can pick and choose which options are enabled for use in the editor. This means that a user can easily reduce the "extreme feature-bloat" with a few clicks of the mouse.
I understand that some of the features offered by the Full CK may introduce code or css or other issues that conflicts with ZC. If certain features are known to cause problems, they could easily be pointed out in install instructions. And after installing, the user could simply use their mouse to disable any dangerous features.
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Second, I think this statement is massively oversimplified: "anyone can grab the latest "full" and upload it to their site in a few minutes".
This may be true for programmers or mensa members (DrB is probably both!), but probably not the rest. I'm not a programmer, but I've been using ZC for years now and I consider my understanding to be relatively advanced. Yet I ended up losing at least half a day of productivity trying to figure out how to add the "Justify" button to CKEditor.
I'm not an idiot, I swear. I've installed CK before and never had a problem. When I noticed "Justify" was missing, I initially thought I screwed up the install. I wasted a ton of time retracing my steps, then combing through forums before I gave up and posted the question here. Even after I finally figured out that the current iteration of CKEditor available on ZC simply changed the feature set to Standard, I still had to go back and forth between forums to figure out how to resolve the issue.
Yes, the solution I posted is easy. But figuring that out required a lot of time, effort, and some trial and error. The whole episode was an unnecessary waste of time for me, so I made sure to post the solution in here in order to help the next guy not waste his time as well.
If someone could post a "How-To" for installing the full version, in a very simple, step-by-step way as I did, then this could become true (if they happen to find it): "anyone can grab the latest "full" and upload it to their site in a few minutes"
But I think a better, more user-friendly option would simply be what swguy suggests: leaving up the CKEditor mod as it is with just a Standard set of features, but also having "a second version of the plugin offering the Full CKEditor package".
Leave it up to the people to decide if they want feature bloat or barebones.
POWER TO DA PEEPLZ!!!! :)
