Adding "name" attribute to <a> tags in WYSIWYG editor... CKEditor or otherwise

Question

I have an application that builds emails, and part of the includes some non-standard things that you might not see in web such as adding a "name" attribute to links. I need a WYSIWYG and I'm 99% sure we are going with CKEditor so my question is:

1) Is there a way in CKEditor to add a "name" attribute to anchor tags? Is it possible/feasible to write a plugin?

2) If not CKEditor does any other WYSIWYG editors allow this

Here is what I need:

<a href="link.com" name="anchor_name">My Link</a>

Also it would be nice to be able to allow the end use to create custom tags for tracking purposes such as:

<a href="link.com" name="anchor_name" tracking="xs1234567">My Link</a>

Is this possible?

Answer 1

By default CKEditor doesn't support that, but you can write your own plugin to extend the behavior.

The first thing to take into account is the "ACF" system that only allows a subset of elements, attributes, classes and styles, so you have to whitelist your attributes for the a elements.

Then you'll have to take the default link dialog and modify it, or create a plugin that modifies it on the fly to allow the user to set your attributes.

So it's just a matter of reading the documentation to learn how to create a plugin for CKEditor and start coding it.

Answer 2

Not Perfectly Relevant, but you can enable custom html tags like 'span' in WP and ACF editors:

function override_mce_options_and_add_tags($initArray)
{
    $opts = '*[*]';
    $initArray['valid_elements'] = $opts;
    $initArray['extended_valid_elements'] = $opts;
    return $initArray;
}
add_filter('tiny_mce_before_init', 'override_mce_options_and_add_tags');