I am so happy this issue is being addressed, but this is not only important for MediaWiki as such, but also for Wikipedia and her brothers and sisters.
Just imagine what a boost these projects would get when the Wikitext-illiterate would be able to add content without having to bother through learning Wikitext. How many people do you think stop adding content without even having started with Wikipedia, just because the text-screen is obscured with Wikitext, parser-functions, templates and so on. Wikimedia-projects are for the few people who have the will and knowledge (techies i.e). (I know quite a few).
I hoped that the usability-project would take care of FCK-editor integration and that WYSIWYG-editing would/will become standard in the future.
Not only for the sake of MediaWiki and its usage in companies and organizations, but also for the WM-Foundation and its projects.
Regards Peter van Londen
2010/5/19 Robert Cummings robert@interjinn.com
Sullivan, James (NIH/CIT) [C] wrote:
I agree. The latest version that I use (2.6.4) has a (C) menu button
that allows you to add Categories to your page, bringing up a dialog box and showing existing categories to choose from or to create a new one. Nice feature since I always hate, while editing in wikitext, to have to start up a second browser just to go see what categories are available. I agree templates may be challenging, but that would be another brick to lay another day.
Yeah we love being able to select pages and images via the associated popups for those also-- just start typing keywords and a list of matches is generated. We had to increase the list size to 100 though, 10 was way too short.
With respect to templates, FCKeditor has a little button for opening up a list of templates from which a user can select. It supports a title, description, and snapshot image via an XML configuration. We are going to be reworking this to have it support Wiki templates since currently it only supports HTML. Probably we'll ditch the XML file though and use a wiki page to configure entries so it can be done by bureaucrats :)
Anyways, a well integrated WYSIWYG is far less cumbersome for many of these routines tasks than using wiki code and multiple windows to view what is available. Although, there's nothing really stopping the WikiCode editor from having some of this functionality in it's buttons also instead of them just outputing the empty WikiCode for a link, or file.
Cheers, Rob. -- http://www.interjinn.com Application and Templating Framework for PHP
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