In a quest to make my client web site’s XHTML compliant yet still highly configurable by my client, I went on a search to replace the free RichTextBox editor I was using in favor of one that supported XHTML.   Lucky for me, I found one that did that and much more: FCKeditor.



FCKeditor is on open-source rich textbox editor that works on nearly every major platform.  To use it in an ASP.NET web page, as a user control, there is an additional download which provides the necessary .dll.

Configuring the textbox was relatively easy.  The only issue I had was trying to get the file browser to work. The file browser is a very cool tool that allows the user to browser to a specific folder on the hard drive and upload or link to files and images to put into the content window.  This saves the end user from having direct access to the web server to upload files and then having to guess at the URL to those files to create links to them.

The issue I had related to the path of the folder where users can store his files.  That path is different on my workstation than it is on the live web server because my workstation is running Windows XP and each web site is in a virtual directory where as the live server is a Windows 2003 Server and each web site is in its own IIS site. 

For my workstation, I defined the file upload folder as:

<appSettings file="user.config">
 <add key="FCKeditor:UserFilesPath" value="/MYVIRTUALSITE/userfiles" />
</appSettings>

… where as I had to define the path as follows on the live server:

<appSettings file="user.config">
 <add key="FCKeditor:UserFilesPath" value="/userfiles" />
</appSettings>

Note that the path must start with a forward slash “/” and not a “~/”.