It's time to replace FreeTextBox with r.a.d.editor in the Community Server blog engine

Now that I entered the blogosphere, I am finding out that apart from the time spent writing the content of a blog entry, you often have to spend time to properly format the content, include code, links, images and so on.

In all internal applications we are using r.a.d.editor and I've been having some real issues with the FreeTextBox control that comes with Community Server by default. Some of the things I have struggled with:
- table management
- link management
- <P>s and <BR>s
- image management (I don't like going into HTML view to add an image)
- absence of a spellchecker (FreeTextBox uses IE spell which is an Active X control)
- lack of an HTML snippets tool
- no easy way to clean pasted MS Word content
- and so the list goes...

At first I thought I would be able to live with it as everyone around is quite busy and I didn't want to distract anyone from the dev team. Nonetheless, today at lunch someone started talking about our blogs and I shared my experiences. It turned out that the other bloggers and future bloggers also had the same problems and we decided to replace FreeTextBox with r.a.d.editor. It's just way easier to create content with our tool (a biased vendor's opinion you might say:).

The good news for CS and r.a.d.editor customers is that we will be posting the code that we used to replace FreeTextBox with r.a.d.editor and everyone using CS will be able to add extra horsepower to their blogs.