Loading site-specific CSS files into Sitecore's rich text editor

Background

We work with a lot of multi-site Sitecore installations, and generally feel this is an area Sitecore excels at... however...

The Sitecore content editor interface does have some areas that don't lend it to good multi-site use though, one of which is the rich text editor.  Ideally the CSS dropdown in the editor would display CSS classes from a site-specific CSS file.  Unfortunately, out of the box Sitecore does not have the facility to do this.

Without the ability to have site-specific CSS classes, the admins for each site in a multi site installation would be forced to share a CSS file and see styles for all of the other sites - not the greatest user experience.

The Solution(s) - old and new

We've solved this for a while by using code similar to what's found on the Sitecore Developer Network.  This worked great for a time, but as of Sitecore 6.4 it stopped working.

So what happened?  The default.aspx and the code-behind class that are key to the above solution are still present in Sitecore 6.4, but they are not used.

Thankfully, we found a great blog post on the subject by Mark Stiles that pointed us toward the correct solution for Sitecore 6.4+.  The revamped rich text editor uses a handful of new classes, and, as always, knowing where to look makes all the difference.  A big thanks to Mark, as no one else on the Sitecore Developer Network or elsewhere seems to be talking about this.  (Just a note: I would recommend inheriting from Sitecore.Shell.Controls.RichTextEditor.EditorPage and overriding OnLoad, rather than copying it from Reflector or similar as it appears Mark did).

Inheriting from Sitecore.Shell.Controls.RichTextEditor.EditorPage allowed us to support site-specific CSS files in the RTE and keep the level of user-friendliness our clients have come to expect.

 

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Comments

[Nate]

Hi Christie,

I haven't tried it in 6.5 yet, as I'm still working on a SC 6.4 project currently. That said, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work.

Are you trying the first approach (custom editor page)? Someone noted in the comments on Mark's blog (http://www.markstiles.net/Blog/2011/04/29/multi-site-rich-text-editor-stylesheet.aspx) that the second approach (overriding SetupStylesheets()) is only run once per domain so it may not be a good fit in many cases.