Neos is an open source content management system (CMS) that’s focused on easy content creation and editing. The goal is to allow website owners to directly edit their content in-place, for a full WYSIWYG experience.

Unfortunately, the original version of Neos used a monolithic rich text editor that came with a suite of features the Neos team didn’t need. Worse still, it wasn’t easily customizable. Dmitri Pisarev, a member of the Neos team, says there was “constant fighting with the code.”

In keeping with their minimalist approach to content editing, Neos wanted a simplified interface, but it took sustained development effort just to remove UI elements from their existing rich text editor. “What we wanted was to have modularity and get only what we ask for without getting everything else included,” says Dmitri.

Neos needed a rich text editor with:

The Neos team quickly found that CKEditor 5 offered all the customization they needed. Unlike their previous editor, CKEditor’s modular plugin-based architecture allowed Neos to pick and choose the features they needed – or build their own.

“The integration was extremely lean. We didn’t have to override any code. We just wrote a few plugins that were missing in the editor itself and enabled some specific plugins that we needed for our purposes,” says Dmitri.

Best of all, Neos had full control over the editor interface, so the team could tweak it to suit different parts of the CMS. As Dmitri explains: “We made it completely customizable for the integrator to choose which plugins they need for a particular section…For example, the page title section does not even have bold and italic plugins, as we wanted it this way.”

Thanks to the easy customization of CKEditor, the Neos team no longer spends hours of development time trying to get their rich text editor component to behave. Instead, that engineering effort can go towards adding new features and improving the Neos CMS.

Dmitri and the team are thrilled to find their development and their CMS are more efficient than ever. “Working with CKEditor 5 was so smooth and effortless that it saved us a lot of time,” says Dmitri. “It’s the first rich text editor that I was able to understand how it works. We didn’t need to fight with a jungle of messy code that you are not able to fix yourself. It was a real productivity boost for us.”