Roan Kattouw <roan.kattouw <at> gmail.com> writes:
While I'm sure this particular bug has been fixed,
it sounds like the
underlying problem remains. FCKeditor seems to be converting wikitext
to HTML, let users edit the HTML, then convert the HTML back to
wikitext. The bugs would then result from the fact that the
wikitext->HTML->wikitext round-trip (or wikitext->whatever internal
representation is used->wikitext) isn't clean.
Hi, I work at Wikia (although I am relatively new and I have only
made small modifications to the editor). This basic criticism of
the design is true and is still the source of issues, but it's been
improving. I think another problem for experienced wiki editors
is the "sea of puzzle pieces" that happens when you edit a
complicated page, because it can't render templates (plus a
bunch of other things it can't render that show puzzles)
We are currently almost finished with a look-and-feel revamp
of the RTE, which is being rolled out over the next few weeks.
A blog post about it can be read here:
http://community.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Sarah_Manley/A_Facelift_for_the_E…
I'd encourage those with an interest in such things to skim the
comments, it's an interesting range of responses, but mostly
positive. This re-skin is feature identical for users, but for
developers it addresses the puzzle piece problem, which
should allow us to more easily add custom widgets to render
particular extension tags. It's not in this first release but
we've also internally been experimenting with ways to render
templates in a more useful way than a green puzzle piece.
I wish I could point to a running instance, but it will be out
there soon and I'll put up a link to a test wiki asap if anyone
is interested. Many of the look and feel changes are all
specific to the custom skin that Wikia uses so I'm not sure
how useful it is to others, but the code just got checked in
to our trunk SVN this weekend:
http://trac.wikia-code.com/browser/wikia/trunk/extensions/wikia/EditPageRes…
Trevor and I talked about this issue about a year and
a half ago, and
figured the best way around round-trip bugs was to not do round-trips
at all. Instead, wikitext or something close to it should be used as
an internal representation, and/or only the parts of the page the user
touches should actually change.
Internally we have discussions about the future of the RTE
but they are still at the "grand vision" stage to be honest.
I think the current plan is to see what transpires with the
upcoming Parser redesign and keep our code in sync. The
primary authors of this RTE reskin will be at the Berlin
hackathon as well.
I'm also happy to field any particular questions about the
RTE and get them sent to the right people here at Wikia.
Owen Davis