I have a requirement for an intranet wiki for sales, marketing and other people who have no technical abilities whatsoever.
I'd like to use MediaWiki. This requires WYSIWYG.
There is no good WYSIWYG for MediaWiki - but what are the least-worst solutions others have managed with this requirement, using extensions I can download? (e.g. your personal hacked-up CKeditor is a good answer if you have your patch set publicly available.)
(MW 1.16, by the way, is ridiculously easy to install, notably more so than previous versions. From being asked "could we have a wiki for this?" to installed with happy users with ImageMagick, rsvg and Extension:InputBox was under an hour. I'm really looking forward to 1.17.)
- d.
What do you mean by "good"? A full-fledged office suite, e.g. Open or MS? Auto-completion when typing in names of articles in your wiki, or templates?
As far as I can tell, Media Wiki was designed for relatively simple formatting. I admit I write in wiki-text, though I now tend to switch to FCKeditor (Version 1.0.1) to edit tables. It does a pretty good job, and allows you to go back & forth between wiki text & "rich editor" modes. * *
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Haim (Howard) Roman Computer Center, Jerusalem College of Technology Phone: 052-8-592-599 (6022 from within Machon Lev)
On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 18:05, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I have a requirement for an intranet wiki for sales, marketing and other people who have no technical abilities whatsoever.
I'd like to use MediaWiki. This requires WYSIWYG.
There is no good WYSIWYG for MediaWiki - but what are the least-worst solutions others have managed with this requirement, using extensions I can download? (e.g. your personal hacked-up CKeditor is a good answer if you have your patch set publicly available.)
(MW 1.16, by the way, is ridiculously easy to install, notably more so than previous versions. From being asked "could we have a wiki for this?" to installed with happy users with ImageMagick, rsvg and Extension:InputBox was under an hour. I'm really looking forward to 1.17.)
- d.
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
I've been using the FCKeditor with our wikis and it is fine for regular use. So if your users will just be entering text and an occasional table or image it is more than fine. But, if they plan to do things a little more fancy such as adding links or alt-text to images or using templates they could run into some frustration since the FCKeditor doesn't really handle these well and you need to use wikitext. But, the FCKeditor has gotten my users over the wikitext fear and opened up using wikis at my site to general users. Keep in mind the FCKeditor has its bugs but they are few and have not caused any frustration I am aware of for regular users. Plus I let our users know that if they are going to get fancy they should probably be using wikitext anyway.
Has anyone heard where the CKeditor's integration with Mediawiki is going? A few years ago I heard it would happen when they hit version 3.0, which happened more than a while ago. The FCKeditor, while adequate, seems to no longer be in any real development phase. And I was hopeful that Wikia would have some success with their WYSIWYG editor, but evidently not. I understand that the needs of Wikipedia drive the Mediawiki development, but why a WYSIWYG editor for Mediawiki is not obvious I don't understand.
On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 12:02 PM, Sullivan, James (NIH/CIT) [C] sullivan@mail.nih.gov wrote:
[...] But, if they plan to do things a little more fancy such as adding links
Links sure are fancy!
-Chad
On 10 February 2011 17:02, Sullivan, James (NIH/CIT) [C] sullivan@mail.nih.gov wrote:
I've been using the FCKeditor with our wikis and it is fine for regular use. So if your users will just be entering text and an occasional table or image it is more than fine. But, if they plan to do things a little more fancy such as adding links or alt-text to images or using templates they could run into some frustration since the FCKeditor doesn't really handle these well and you need to use wikitext. But, the FCKeditor has gotten my users over the wikitext fear and opened up using wikis at my site to general users. Keep in mind the FCKeditor has its bugs but they are few and have not caused any frustration I am aware of for regular users. Plus I let our users know that if they are going to get fancy they should probably be using wikitext anyway.
Our organisation isn't government, but I'd say the typical user has comparable technical competency, i.e. they're good at their jobs, they want to share information, but they largely can't work computers.
Is it that hard adding links in FCKeditor? I'd have thought that was a pretty basic function ...
-d.
Is it that hard adding links in FCKeditor? I'd have thought that was a pretty basic function ...
Sorry for my poor English, which I have only been speaking for 55 years...
The links I was referring to are image links, as in when you click on an image you are sent to a designated page or URL and not to the image's page, which is what happens when you click on a regular image.
For example, a normal image is specified with [[Image:Picture.png]] and when you click on the image you are sent to the images page "Image:Picture.png".
But you can designate a link for the image thusly [[Image:Picture.png|link=Main Page]]. Clicking on that image will send you to the Main Page, and [[Image:Picture.png|link=http://www.mediawiki.org]] will send you to the mediawiki.org website.
Similarly you can add alt-text by specifying [[Image:Picture.png|alt=this is a picture]] which will provide the alt-text "this is a picture" when your mouse hovers over the image.
The FCKeditor does not handle these image attributes, just size, position and caption, which was my only point about links, and yes, I consider it "fancy" since most users do not add these attributes to their images. If they did I would be getting a lot of complaints about using the FCKeditor wrt images.
-Jim
-----Original Message----- From: David Gerard [mailto:dgerard@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2011 2:01 PM To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Least-worst present WYSIWYG solution?
On 10 February 2011 17:02, Sullivan, James (NIH/CIT) [C] sullivan@mail.nih.gov wrote:
I've been using the FCKeditor with our wikis and it is fine for regular use. So if your users will just be entering text and an occasional table or image it is more than fine. But, if they plan to do things a little more fancy such as adding links or alt-text to images or using templates they could run into some frustration since the FCKeditor doesn't really handle these well and you need to use wikitext. But, the FCKeditor has gotten my users over the wikitext fear and opened up using wikis at my site to general users. Keep in mind the FCKeditor has its bugs but they are few and have not caused any frustration I am aware of for regular users. Plus I let our users know that if they are going to get fancy they should probably be using wikitext anyway.
Our organisation isn't government, but I'd say the typical user has comparable technical competency, i.e. they're good at their jobs, they want to share information, but they largely can't work computers.
Is it that hard adding links in FCKeditor? I'd have thought that was a pretty basic function ...
-d.
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On 10 February 2011 19:24, Sullivan, James (NIH/CIT) [C] sullivan@mail.nih.gov wrote:
The FCKeditor does not handle these image attributes, just size, position and caption, which was my only point about links, and yes, I consider it "fancy" since most users do not add these attributes to their images. If they did I would be getting a lot of complaints about using the FCKeditor wrt images.
This is most promising :-D Yes, if they want to do fancy image attributes they can use wikitext :-)
My last experiment with FCK was hampered by it messing up the tags used by Extension:InputBox - our users are very fond of the "Create an article!" box I put on the front page of our internal wikis, but ediitng the page in FCK mangles it. Has anyone else encountered this? Or even solved it?
- d.
Yea, another annoying feature of the FCKeditor is it trying to make sense of what it does not understand, like some extension tags, leading it to mangle them, like replacing < and > with > and <. If your users are going to use an extension's features and FCKeditor is going to mangle them then this may be a real issue. I use the Inputbox but I tend to be the only one editing those pages and I normally use wikitext as my default editor.
Still, overall, the FCKeditor is accepted pretty well here but we only add extensions to a wiki when a user requests it. Normally only Cite and FCKeditor are added, and FCKeditor understands and uses Cite. I've installed various Calendar extensions, Widgets, and CategoryTree with no complaints but that doesn't mean the users have run into all the possible problems.
-Jim
-----Original Message----- From: David Gerard [mailto:dgerard@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2011 2:35 PM To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Least-worst present WYSIWYG solution?
On 10 February 2011 19:24, Sullivan, James (NIH/CIT) [C] sullivan@mail.nih.gov wrote:
The FCKeditor does not handle these image attributes, just size, position and caption, which was my only point about links, and yes, I consider it "fancy" since most users do not add these attributes to their images. If they did I would be getting a lot of complaints about using the FCKeditor wrt images.
This is most promising :-D Yes, if they want to do fancy image attributes they can use wikitext :-)
My last experiment with FCK was hampered by it messing up the tags used by Extension:InputBox - our users are very fond of the "Create an article!" box I put on the front page of our internal wikis, but ediitng the page in FCK mangles it. Has anyone else encountered this? Or even solved it?
- d.
_______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
David Gerard wrote:
This is most promising :-D Yes, if they want to do fancy image attributes they can use wikitext :-)
My last experiment with FCK was hampered by it messing up the tags used by Extension:InputBox - our users are very fond of the "Create an article!" box I put on the front page of our internal wikis, but ediitng the page in FCK mangles it. Has anyone else encountered this? Or even solved it?
- d.
What if you hide the <inputbox> inside a template?
On 10 February 2011 23:28, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
My last experiment with FCK was hampered by it messing up the tags used by Extension:InputBox - our users are very fond of the "Create an article!" box I put on the front page of our internal wikis, but ediitng the page in FCK mangles it. Has anyone else encountered this? Or even solved it?
What if you hide the <inputbox> inside a template?
Good idea! Though FCK kindly makes it impossible even to properly create the *template*. I had to comment it out in LocalSettings.php, create {{Create an article}} then uncomment it. Still, it's there now ... sort of a workaround :-)
- d.
Good idea! Though FCK kindly makes it impossible even to properly create the *template*. I had to comment it out in LocalSettings.php, create {{Create an article}} then uncomment it. Still, it's there now ... sort of a workaround :-)
- d.
To set a page, like your template, to not use the FCKeditor when you edit it, put the following magic word in the page:
__NORICHEDITOR__
It is explained here: http://mediawiki.fckeditor.net/index.php/Troubleshooting#Disabling_FCKeditor... and a little discussion about using it in a template here: http://forums.familysearch.org/en/showthread.php?t=1792
-Jim
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