make readonly/disable tinymce textarea

Solution 1:

Use the configuration parameter readonly

tinyMCE.init({
        ...
        theme : "advanced",
        readonly : 1
});

Here is a link to a demo.

Update: What you can do to prevent users from editing content in your editor is to set the contenteditable attribute of the editors iframe body to false:

tinymce.activeEditor.getBody().setAttribute('contenteditable', false);

Solution 2:

From version 4.3.x on you can use code below for readonly mode

tinymce.activeEditor.setMode('readonly');

and for design mode:

tinymce.activeEditor.setMode('design'); 

Solution 3:

IF you only have one editor, this works:

tinymce.activeEditor.getBody().setAttribute('contenteditable', false);

If you have multiple editors, you have to select them by the id of the textarea:

tinyMCE.get('textarea_id').getBody().setAttribute('contenteditable', false);

Solution 4:

Thariama's solution will set all TinyMCE textareas on the page to readonly.

The best solution I've found was posted by Magnar Myrtveit which will set fields to readonly that have the readonly attribute. Here is the code:

tinyMCE.init({
    ...
    setup: function(ed) {
        if ($('#'+ed.id).prop('readonly')) {
            ed.settings.readonly = true;
        }
    }
});

Solution 5:

To disable you can call this command:

tinymce.EditorManager.execCommand('mceToggleEditor', true, tinymceId);

And to again enable the editor you can again call this command.

'mceToggleEditor' command toggles the WYSIWYG mode on or off by displaying or hiding the textarea and editor instance. This is not the same thing as mceAddControl or mceRemoveControl because the instance is still there and uninitialized, so this method is faster.

Link for above command: http://archive.tinymce.com/wiki.php/TinyMCE3x:Command_identifiers