Features that extend a web application's core functionality are very common. We’re talking about content editing, letting users format articles, set up email templates, or even change website content. The only thing left for a developer is to set up an appropriate editing interface.
While building additional features for your web application from scratch can be very rewarding, these features can also bring many problems, especially if they’re complex and require a lot of rich functionality, such as allowing users to format text in various ways, add drag-and-drop interfaces, or even preview content in real time while it’s being edited. These features are provided to users of web applications that edit content in some way through third-party editing tools.
Integrating an edit module as a library in a web application requires more than embedding it; you also need to ensure compatibility, user-friendliness, security, and integration with the rest of the application’s features and functions.
Understand What Your Application Needs
Many web applications have more than just their core functionality. For example, you might have content editing. For example, if you’re building a web application for document creation, users might need to format documents or create email templates. Perhaps even edit website content. These types of editing scenarios are best solved with third-party editing tools.
Technical requirements can also vary widely from tool to tool. So while TinyMCE and CKEditor are often used for rich text editing, other tools can support more structured content or even drag-and-drop web page and site design within a web application.
Another aspect developers must consider is which output format the application using the rich text editing tool will need. Some editors only output HTML (either as a string or within a DOM document), others store and retrieve content as JSON (most often in the form of a content tree stored within an object), while a few tools store content as a series of structured documents. The output of an editor must be saved and then later retrieved from storage to be used within the application.
If you wait until later in development, you risk building an editor that you ultimately have to replace with a better choice.
Choose Between Custom Development and SDK Integration
Now that you have clearly defined your application's needs, you have to decide between building an editor from scratch or using an existing solution you can easily integrate into your web application.
While building editing functionality from scratch gives you full control over the feature. How it looks in your application, it will require considerable development effort to create even the most basic editing features. On top of the initial development effort, you will also have to update and maintain the editor functionality as the application, or even just the browsers, change over time.
For SaaS platforms that offer email marketing, customer communication or campaign management tools, developing a fully functional email editor from scratch can require significant time and resources. Integrating an SDK white-label email builder provides an alternative by allowing developers to incorporate email design capabilities directly into their existing applications. These solutions typically support drag-and-drop editing, customizable templates and responsive email layouts while allowing developers to adapt the interface to their platform's branding. As a result, users can design, edit and manage email content within a familiar environment without needing separate software or advanced HTML knowledge.
Beyond development time, there are costs for editing features. When deciding whether an SDK is suitable for a project, also consider licensing costs, customization limits, vendor lock-in, and ongoing maintenance.
Plan the Integration Architecture
In your architecture, implement a third-party editor as a separate component. You should therefore define how the editor will be initialized, how it will receive content, and how it will inform other components of the application when content has been changed.
A dedicated component can be created for embedding an editor within a React application. You can initialize the editor asynchronously, and editing events can update the application’s state. You can also save content in an embedded editor by sending the edited content in a structured format to a backend API.
By separating the editing tool's responsibility from the rest of your application, you can avoid embedding editing functionality where it doesn't belong.
You should also verify whether the selected editor supports asynchronous initialization and if it offers the possibility to set up custom event handlers for all available editing actions. This feature is very important if users often switch between different documents and editing sessions.
Handle Content Storage and Security
One of the biggest considerations for an embedded HTML editor is how you'll store content, how much you'll validate user-submitted content, and which users are allowed to edit.
Most HTML editors contain plenty of nasty HTML elements and worse. All untrusted content needs to be sanitized before rendering. Validate it on the server. Not on the client. Anyone can easily write a very simple client-side validation. But a determined hacker can easily circumvent it.
For file uploads in documents, restrict the size of uploaded files and the number of files that can be uploaded at the same time.
Even when you use an HTML-based editor in your application, you still need to authenticate user-generated content, and you need to control editing authorization outside the editor. This does not have to be more difficult than for other kinds of content in your application but needs to be planned for.
Customize the Editing Experience
To create an integrated impression of the application, the embedded editor must have the same design as the rest of the application: the same colors, the same fonts, the same look and feel for buttons, and the same layout for navigation.
Additionally, we will test the ability to configure toolbars, switch themes, and deactivate features. By deactivating unnecessary features, you can tailor the editor to specific user groups.
Performance is also important. As mentioned, embodied editors are embedded within your application. Therefore, large editor libraries should not be loaded in the initial page load. Ideally, lazy-load the editor when the user enters editing mode.
As with any other feature or view of your app, test the embedded editor across your supported browsers as well as all screen sizes, including testing of keyboard shortcuts, accessibility, etc. Also test scenarios where a user is editing a document when they are forced to leave the editor, for example, due to a network failure. Test opening a saved document and verifying that all formatting and embedded elements are still there.
Test the Integration Before Deployment
Just as an editor may work well in isolation, it can behave in unforeseen ways once integrated into a larger application, hooked up to authentication services, APIs, and the application’s state management.
Once you integrate an editor into a project, you can test many aspects, such as saving, error handling, and switching between documents and editing sessions within a document. Also, a saved document must be able to be reopened without losing any of the formatting or embedded media objects.
You can also write automated integration tests. For more complex editing functions, like formatting text with font colors, sizes, backgrounds, etc., that may not work as expected after a dependent library update, it is also good to test them manually.
So, integrating a third-party editing component in your application isn't just about expanding functionality to meet development needs. It should be a thoughtful choice of the right tool, with clear architectural boundaries within your application, to support your real workflows.
