Migrating Redactor Variables to CKEditor Placeholder

[RitterKnightCreative]

Description

We received the message in the CP that Redactor is no longer being supported which is fine, CKEditor seems to be a better option overall. However, one of the breaking changes that's preventing us from migrating is Redactor has the nifty Variables plugin which allows you to put in placeholder content which later gets replaced with the actual content.

We're using this functionality to let a client customize various aspects of their emails from the CP after one of their online trainings is done, which seems to be an ideal use case for this.

After doing some digging it looks CKEditor has already built something similar, essentially using their demo project as a jump-off.

I took a stab at building this myself (and failing) - but what are the odds this plugin can make it into an official Craft CMS build at some point?

[brandonkelly]

It looks like those variables are just stored as [% variable name %] markers in the HTML (potentially with different start/end delimiters). So are you then replacing those with actual values in your template using the |replace filter?

If so, that should continue to work in CKEditor, albeit without the UI for automatically inserting the variable marker.

[RitterKnightCreative]

Appreciate the response Brandon.

Yeh you are correct, we are using replace to swap in the values inserted.

The last part of your reply is most relevant, as they still need some sort of UI for creating new content.

(As an aside I see the marker itself changed between what redactor used previously.)

[Latex88]

Bump, because I really need this Plugin.

[humandevs]

We're also trying to figure out how to do variables in ckeditor. There is the Rich Variables CraftCMS 4.x plugin that can insert ReferenceTags, but it isn't updated for Craft 5 yet, thus only supports plain text and redactor fields, and it only supports global sets, not entries. I've reached out to the developer of Rich Variables @nystudio107 to see about sponsoring an update of that plugin to support craft5, ckeditor, and entry fields instead of just global set fields.

ckeditor does seem to automatically run the @parseRefs directive when querying ckeditor fields via GraphQL, though.

Support for global and scoped (conditional) variables is something we need for our current 'composable content' projects, and would allow CraftCMS to compete with more Enterprise Content Management systems.