CKEditor for Drupal 7 Installation (Enterprise Version)

This website contains links to software which is either no longer maintained or will be supported only until the end of 2019 (CKFinder 2). For the latest documentation about current CKSource projects, including software like CKEditor 4/CKEditor 5, CKFinder 3, Cloud Services, Letters, Accessibility Checker, please visit the new documentation website.

If you look for an information about very old versions of CKEditor, FCKeditor and CKFinder check also the CKEditor forum, which was closed in 2015. If not, please head to StackOverflow for support.

If you want to install the CKEditor module on your Drupal 7 site, follow the steps described below.

First of all, download the installation package (.zip archive) for Drupal 7 from the official CKEditor for Drupal website.

Unpack the contents of the installation package into the drupal/sites/all/modules/ckeditor directory. When the files are unpacked, you should see the following file structure inside the drupal/sites/all/modules directory:

modules                <dir>
   ...
   ckeditor            <dir>
      ckeditor         <dir>
      ckfinder         <dir>
      images           <dir>
      includes         <dir>
      plugins          <dir>
      changelog.html
      ckeditor.api.php
      ckeditor.css
      ckeditor.info
      ckeditor.install
      ckeditor.module
      ...

Go to the Administration Panel of your Drupal 7 site and choose the Modules section. Scroll down to the User interface section and select the checkbox next to the CKEditor module name.

Enabling the CKEditor module in the Drupal 7 Administration Panel


If you want, you can grant permissions for administering CKEditor or modifying the appearance of the editor to selected roles in the Administration panel > People > Permissions section. Scroll to the CKEditor section and select the checkbox next to the "Administer CKEditor access" and/or "Customize CKEditor appearance" permissions for the roles that you want to grant this permission to.

Granting permission to use CKEditor in the Drupal 7 Administration Panel


You can now enter the configuration of your CKEditor for Drupal module by visiting the Administration panel > Configuration > Content Authoring > CKEditor section. You will notice the licensing note at the top — you will now need to enter the details of your license in order to unlock the licensed version of the module.

Unlicensed CKEditor module notice in the Drupal 7 Administration Panel


You can add your license name and key by editing the CKEditor Global Profile in the Global settings section of the CKEditor configuration page. See the License article for more information.

Editing the CKEditor Global Profile in the Drupal 7 Administration Panel


If you want to enable CKFinder, an advanced Ajax file browser, see the Installing CKFinder article.

You should now adjust CKEditor profiles in the Administration panel > Configuration > Content Authoring > CKEditor section. Profiles determine which options are available to users based on system-wide roles. In each profile you can choose which textareas will be replaced by CKEditor, select a default toolbar, and configure some more advanced settings.

important note

Certain text formats (e.g. Filtered HTML) limit allowed HTML tags, so after saving the content you may notice that some tags created with CKEditor are removed. The list of allowed HTML tags can be configured in the Administration panel > Configuration > Content Authoring > Text formats.

Below is a short list of tags that can be created with CKEditor (form elements are not included in this list):

<a> <p> <span> <div> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <img> <map> <area> <hr>
      <br> <br /> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <table> <tbody> <th> <tr> <td> <em> <b> <u> <i> <strong>
      <del> <ins> <sub> <sup> <quote> <blockquote> <pre> <address> <code>
      <cite> <embed> <object> <param> <strike> <caption> <iframe>

Note: Be careful when granting users access to create tags like <iframe>.


The CKEditor installation and basic configuration process is now finished. You can start to use CKEditor with its default settings on your Drupal 7 website.