Add Web-based Content Editing With Substance

Many web applications support user input and it’s great to let users edit their text with formatting. Bold text, headings, links, underlines, all of these features typically require raw HTML to set up.

With the Substance framework, you can support a wide array of editing features, all with one script.

Substance isn’t just a plugin or a simple text editing GUI for the web. It’s an entire framework built to support a web-based editor.

This is also possible using basic CSS libraries but it’s never been this easy. Substance is quick to install and comes with a ton of features you can choose to run (or not run) based on your site’s needs.

Read Also: HTML5 Contenteditable Attribute: Edit Web Content On Front-end

Take a peek at the Examples page to see this in action. It supports pretty much everything from image uploads to custom emojis and even inline forms for web content.

Currently in beta 6, this framework is massive. I think it’s ready for production sites and it’s already used on a number of big web apps such as Stencila. But somehow, this framework has slipped through the cracks in major developer communities.

It has a full GitHub repo with a table of browser support and custom options you can toy with.

All files are loaded directly through npm, so it helps if you have some Node experience. The biggest way to get going is by diving into the code and learning how to customize the Substance framework for your own web project.

For this, I recommend the online documentation which is full of mini-tutorials for all skill levels.

To learn more, visit the main website or check out this quick two-minute intro video.