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The BIG Reason

Music, opinions, and portfolio of Mark Eagleton, musician and web developer in Northern CA.

thebigreason TinyMCE skin
thebigreason TinyMCE skin is something you can be proud to give to your clients.

thebigreason TinyMCE Skin

Moxicode System’s TinyMCE javascript rich text editor is my choice for the content management systems and web applications I build. It’s highly configurable and widely supported. It’s also ugly as fucking sin. So I made my own skin.

I spend a lot of time and effort making my web applications elegant and polished. To have them marred by a text editor that looks like a throwback to Microsoft Word 95 is insulting to me as well as my clients. Thankfully Moxicode built in a convenient means for making custom skins, and I took advantage of it.

I replaced most of the icons of the default theme with the extremely popular famfamfam silk icons by Mark James. I further spiffed up the presentation with some more screen and Mac friendly fonts, and threw in a background image for the tool and status bars.

My skin is designed to be bare bones and elegant. Any seasoned developer will agree that the amount of control you enable in the rich text editors you put into your CMSs is in direct proportion to how fucked up the resulting content created with them will look. If you like to enable rows and rows of tools in your RTE toolbars, this theme isn’t going to look quite as sexy, but neither is the front end it controls.

As a thank you to my web development savvy readers, I’m sharing (free of charge of course). Just unarchive the zip file, place the thebigreason folder in the /tiny_mce/themes/advanced/skins/ directory of your TinyMCE editor, and place the following option in your tinyMCE.init() script:

skin : "thebigreason"

Download thebigreason TinyMCE skin version 1.2. (released May 14, 2012)

  • Cleaned up the pop-up dailogs
  • Looks nicer with multiple toolbars
  • Pruned some CSS

Download thebigreason TinyMCE skin version 1. (released September 28, 2008)