I'm working on an accordion component, which authors can add to pages to collapse content that isn't relevant to everyone. Typically I would do this as an Accordion paragraph that references Accordion item paragraphs. But this can break the author's flow as they compose a page - adding a text section, then an accordion paragraph, then another text section. Since there are wysiwyg buttons available for accordions, I wondered if it was possible to add it that way and just have one text area.
I started to create my own wysiwyg button modeled after the others I found, but since this requires learning the ckeditor api and writing javascript, it became a lot of work. Also, the markup is stored in the javascript plugin, so changing the template is not very easy. This means that the plugin has to be built specifically for each theme that uses it. So I looked at the entity embed module to see how they handle this. What's great is that they use a div with a data attribute, which tells drupal which entity to load and display. The theme can control the template when it's loaded so it's easy to customize. If I continued down this path of creating a custom editor button, I would look at doing something similar, storing the content as attributes on a div and rendering with a template. But since the ckeditor api is still foreign to me, I kept looking for ways to build these flexible components that could be embedded.
I came across 2 modules that can be used to embed paragraphs in wysiwyg content. Paragraphs Entity Embed, which does exactly what it sounds like, and Paragraphs Inline Entity Form, which allows Paragraphs to be used with Entity Embed via Inline Entity Form. Cool, so what are the differences, and which one should I use.
First of all, both are relatively experimental, with under 100 active sites each. Paragraphs Inline Entity Form has a beta release and Paragraphs Entity Embed is in alpha. If you choose to use them, be prepared for hiccups along the way.
Both have a similar setup. You use the Entity Embed config to set up a button and then add that to your editor. There are some differences in how the forms appear once you use them.
A big deal breaker I ran into with Paragraphs Inline Entity Form is that it doesn't supported nested paragraphs. This means that my Accordion items inside the Accordion will break it. Therefore I'm looking at Paragraphs Entity Embed as the winner although I think it needs a little more refinement before fully relying on it.
This issue points out that Paragraphs Entity Embed doesn't support revisions, which makes me wonder how it actually works: https://www.drupal.org/project/paragraphs_entity_embed/issues/3004077. Is the data model stable enough that you won't run into problems later if you actually use revisions on the page? More testing is needed.