Introduction to CKEditor 5 architecture

This guide introduces the main pillars of the CKEditor 5 architecture. It is assumed that you have read the Framework’s overview and saw some code in the Quick start guide. This should help you go through the next steps.

# Main components

CKEditor 5 Framework comes with its 3 main pillars:

• Core editor architecture

  The core editor architecture is implemented by the @ckeditor/ckeditor5-core package. It consists of some core classes and interfaces that glue everything together.

  The main purpose of the core editor architecture is to lay the groundwork for implementing editor features. Therefore, it introduces concepts such as plugins and commands which simplify and standardize the way of implementing features.

• Editing engine

  The editing engine is implemented by the @ckeditor/ckeditor5-engine package. It is the biggest and by far the most complex piece of the framework, implementing the custom data model, the view layer, conversion mechanisms, the rendering engine responsible for taming contentEditable and a lot more.

• UI library

  The standard UI library is implemented by the @ckeditor/ckeditor5-ui package. It contains a simple MVC implementation whose main goal is to best fit the CKEditor 5 needs. Furthermore, it introduces basic UI components to be used by editor features.