Because of issues with the YUI Rich Text Editor, I’ve convinced the bosses that we should use a modified version of the flex RTE control. Though flex has some weird htmlText quirks, the subset of HTML it renders (bold, italic, underline, font sizes/colors, and a few more) are almost exactly the subset of HTML we want our users to have access to. The downside is that the built-in RTE also uses a bunch of markup which is completely bogus, so I’ll have to do some regexp replacements to get it to spit out actually-usable HTML. These are the modifications that I’ll (hopefully) be making:

• As we want some consistency in our rich-text-editable fields, I can remove the font selection altogether.
• The flex-based font tag is pretty ridiculous and bears only loose resemblance to the actual html tag, so I’ll have to fix that
• Along with that, all of our text will need to be the same size… I’ll instead be adding a fake “Heading” dropdown which will modify the textsize in flex, but export heading tags to HTML
• Proper font-coloring will have to be done in-flex and then removed when it exports the HTML
• The built-in linking system is pretty atrocious–you select some text, click on the link textField, type in your link, and press Enter. I’ll be replacing that with a more traditional “Insert Link” popup dialogue (along with a “Remove Link” button).
• Add a couple of features which are really only relevant to our particular site.

While getting started on the link buttons, I was looking at the code from the RichTextEditor.mxml file. In several places, there are calls to textArea.getTextField(). I emulated those calls only to find that the function doesn’t exist. After Googling around for awhile and getting nowhere, I finally stumbled onto a solution in an Indian flex message board (of all places). It turns out that getTextField is in namespace mx_internal, though I haven’t been able to find that documented anywhere. Yay Adobe. Anyway, almost got the insert/remove link buttons working and I’ll post some examples/source when it gets more pretty.
Update: the RTE got pushed to the back-burner a little bit, so I’ll have to do some less fun stuff before I get back to it.