SharePoint Inline HTML Editor

One of our clients had very specific requirements for the way in which their editors manage the main body content of a page. Here is some background:

With the previous version of SharePoint (MOSS 2007), page editors could edit page content using a Rich Text editor that sat above the content field. This is shown below:



With SharePoint 2010, the Ribbon provides the editing functionality, as shown below:



Even though our client is using SharePoint 2010, they wanted to use the MOSS-style page editor, rather than the Ribbon. This was for a subset of editors, on one specific site.

One way to solve this is to switch the User Interface (UI) version of the site from "4", to "3" e.g. switch from the SharePoint 2010 UI to the MOSS UI. This is done via the SPWeb.UIVersion property.

We didn't want to change the UI version so in the end, the solution was to:

1) Create a custom edit form.
2) Change the control used to edit the page content from SharePoint:FormField to SharePoint:InputFormTextBox

The InputFormTextBox has some properties that allow Rich Text, which are shown below:

<SharePoint:InputFormTextBox TextMode="MultiLine" Rows="6" RichText="true" RichTextMode="Compatible" runat="server" />