Replace textarea with rich text editor in Django Admin?

I would like to know the best way to replace a standard textarea field with a rich text editor in Django Admin?

There's an add-on Django application to provide TinyMCE support for Django admin forms without having to muck around with admin templates or Django newform internals.

Take a look on this snippet - basic idea is to include custom JS in your admin definitions which will replace standard text areas with rich-text editor.

For jQuery/FCKEditor such JS could look like that:

$(document).ready(function() {
    $("textarea").each(function(n, obj) {
        fck = new FCKeditor(obj.id) ;
            fck.BasePath = "/admin-media/fckeditor/" ;
            fck.ReplaceTextarea() ;
    });
});

I'd say: define your own ModelAdmin class and overwrite the widget used for particular field, like:

class ArticleAdminModelForm(forms.ModelForm):
    description = forms.CharField(widget=widgets.AdminWYMEditor)

    class Meta:
        model = models.Article

(AdminWYMEditor is a forms.Textarea subclass that adds WYMEditor with configuration specific to Django admin app).

See this blog post by Jannis Leidel to see how this widget can be implemented.

At the date of the post and the answers TinyMCE was quite popular (as it probably remains today). But after some time ckeditor has appeared and many consider that a better alternative, including many SO users:

Compare TinyMCE and CKeditor for a Wiki

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/tinymce-vs-ckeditor

There is also a 2013 review of WISIWYG editors with Django in Russian:

http://habrahabr.ru/company/htdt/blog/202782/

Currently the most straight forward way to use tinymce in django admin is to use Grappelli.

http://code.google.com/p/django-grappelli/

Grappelli is also a requirement for django-filebrowser so if you want the whole shebang you will gotta need it anyways.