We have tried installing two Mediawiki extensions, FCKEditor http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FCKeditor_%28by_FCKeditor_and_W ikia%29 (Wikitext version) and CategorySuggest http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CategorySuggest . In both cases they caused format loss in pages that used text indenting, and we've had to remove them from our site since some groups do a lot of indenting, and they really need to in order for their text, code snippets, etc. to make sense.
In most cases the indenting is done using leading spaces, which seems to be the recommended way with Mediawiki. <PRE> tags aren't really recommended and some formatting can't be done inside them, but they do seem to maintain the indents better than just leading spaces. We've also had some people doing indenting using various levels of colons (:), and those are also being lost.
Have other people run into this, and are there any workarounds? Both of these extensions would really be a benefit to us if we could overcome this loss of format issue. I figured when we ran into the problem with CategorySuggest that maybe it was just a fluke, peculiar to that extension, but now that it's two of them I'm wondering if this will be a common problem, and that other extensions we try will also cause format problems.
Thanks, Pat
The FCKeditor is known to have bugs. A new version (2.6) seems close to being released so you might want to try that version when its available to see if the bugs have been fixed.
One workaround is to leave the FCKeditor in place but tell your users who do not want to use it to either:
1) disable it in their "my preferences" page. On that page go to the "Misc" tab and select the "Rich Editor: disable globally" (you may need a recent version of Mediawiki to see this option). When a user does that they will have the default editor that comes with Mediawiki to use instead of FCKeditor. 2) Or, they can continue to use the FCKeditor but select the "Wikitext" button in the FCKeditor menu before editing so they edit the wikitext. I have not heard of any bugs when editing using FCKeditor in Wikitext mode, just the usual complaints wikitext is a pain to edit in and that it would be a lot better if the editor was bug free.
I have not used the CategorySuggest extension so I can't speak to its issues.
-Jim
-----Original Message----- From: Wolesky, Pat [mailto:pwolesky@ptc.com] Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 3:57 PM To: mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Format issues when extensions installed,leading spaces
We have tried installing two Mediawiki extensions, FCKEditor http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FCKeditor_%28by_FCKeditor_and_W ikia%29 (Wikitext version) and CategorySuggest http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CategorySuggest . In both cases they caused format loss in pages that used text indenting, and we've had to remove them from our site since some groups do a lot of indenting, and they really need to in order for their text, code snippets, etc. to make sense.
In most cases the indenting is done using leading spaces, which seems to be the recommended way with Mediawiki. <PRE> tags aren't really recommended and some formatting can't be done inside them, but they do seem to maintain the indents better than just leading spaces. We've also had some people doing indenting using various levels of colons (:), and those are also being lost.
Have other people run into this, and are there any workarounds? Both of these extensions would really be a benefit to us if we could overcome this loss of format issue. I figured when we ran into the problem with CategorySuggest that maybe it was just a fluke, peculiar to that extension, but now that it's two of them I'm wondering if this will be a common problem, and that other extensions we try will also cause format problems.
Thanks, Pat
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