CKEditor Plugins

CKEditor has a plugin-based architecture. In fact, initially the editor core is an empty box, which is then filled with features provided by plugins. Plugins are the most important building blocks of CKEditor, they provide all editor features, including user interface rendering, text manipulation, data input and output, etc.

All CKEditor plugins are built on top of the base which is called the CKEditor Core, represented by the CKEditor Core API.

A huge variety of plugins is provided by both the core CKEditor development team and the CKEditor developers community. The CKEditor Add-on Repository is the starting point to find and share them.

If you found some useful plugins in the CKEditor Add-ons Repository, you can easily add them to your custom build. The easiest method is to visit the online builder page and find and install your favorite plugins. however, if you have plugins developed by yourself or by third parties, you can add plugins to your local installation manually by following the steps described below:

1. Extract the plugin .zip archive.

2. Copy the plugin files to the plugins folder of your CKEditor 4 installation. Each plugin must be placed in a sub-folder that matches its “technical” name.

   For example, the Language plugin would be installed into this folder: <CKEditor folder>/plugins/language.

3. Check and resolve plugin dependencies. If a plugin needs others to work, you will need to add these manually as well.

4. Enable the plugin. Use the extraPlugins setting to add the plugin to your configuration:

   config.extraPlugins = 'language';

   If a plugin has any dependencies, you will need to enable these, too.