Brion Vibber <brion <at> pobox.com> writes:
Note that for Wikipedia that's not just going to affect experienced editors
Very true! I think we have more inexperienced editors, and that's been a product design focus for us for a while so I tend to make assumptions based on that.
Do you mean that it doesn't yet provide any way to see and edit the contents of templates and tag hook extensions, but that infrastructure has come in which will make it possible in the future?
Yep, that's my understanding. We have added custom editing tools for a few home grown Wikia things but it's painful and requires modifications to the Parser and I don't recommend looking at that code. :) One of the internal goals was to make that easier and my understanding is it's been done. I don't know the details yet, we are getting a full presentation on it next week by the developer. For templates, the proposal just showed them expanded/rendered in the page but read-only and I'm not sure if that's going to be in the product or not. For tags, there are hooks that allow the extension developer to put up a modal edit/design mode, and since those are just simple HTML templates and ajax calls, it's a lot easier to develop.
An example of that is here (in the old editor, done the old way with an ugly parser hack).
http://kirkburn.wikia.com/index.php?title=PollTest8&action=edit