On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 10:10:25PM +0200, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
Dumb question: so, would this be an alternative to Etherpad lite integration with MediaWiki via the EtherEditor extension?
Yes and no.
There are definitely multiple options here, but here's the situation as I see it:
* EtherEditor is in a broken state because it was written for an earlier version of Etherpad Lite, so we'd need to rewrite some of the EPL plugins and API access methods that I wrote initially if we wanted to bring it back.
* Etherpad Lite doesn't really play well with wikitext, and its formatting options are only a small subset of what we'd need to support in MediaWiki, which means we either need to use the old method of editing wikitext source or build support for tables, definition lists, and more into EPL core.
* It's been almost a year since I started working on EtherEditor and put the etherpad.wmflabs.org instance up, and EPL still isn't puppetized.
* Towtruck is built with the idea of helping people in mind - so for things like helping new users or working together on an existing HTML form, it makes a lot of sense.
* Towtruck also has better support for non-standard editing systems (like VisualEditor, for example), so we'd probably be better off using it in the long run and not having to worry about writing up-to-date plugins for supporting all possible wikitext constructs and their visual representations - VisualEditor already handles that, so we can just offload it.
That being said, maybe the VE team already has different plans, e.g. to use something like ShareJS, which is a little lighter-weight and would give them the ability to customize the interface a lot more.
Hope that helps :)