After a long period of development, the new major release of FCKEditor has shipped.

The most notable change is the new name: it went from FCKEditor, which many people didn’t like because of its similarity to an English bad word (it was made by the initials of the project founder, Frederico Caldeira Knabben) to CKEditor where CK stands for “content & knowledge”.

But obviously this is not the only change: it’s amazingly fast, it has a completely new UI, no more popup but only js modal dialogs, produces valid XHTML code (and hopefully it will not screw-up the code snippets written with WLW) and much more. Read the official release note to know more: CKEditor 3.0 is here!

And also I recommend playing with the demo for more complete experience. It’s impressive!

At the moment there is no server-side integration like it was with FCKEditor 2.x, but given the very easy Javascript API this is not a big deal. But the really missing feature is the lack of an integrated file/image browser: if you are building a closed source project you use the other product built by CKSource, CKFinder, which is a very powerful file browser. But unfortunately it doesn’t come with an opensource license: this prevents the usage of CKEditor in opensource projects like Subtext and DotNetNuke.

They say there will be a trimmed-down CKFinder with CKEditor 3.1 but until then, don’t expect to see CKEditor integrated with Subtext.