(CC'd inez @ wikia)
In the process of getting a better feel for the current state of Wikia, Wikihow, & a few others' rich text editor tools, I'm going through Wikia's CKEditor-based RTE extension and seeing if I can get it working on MediaWiki trunk.
I've got a fork from Wikia's SVN in this gitorious project: http://www.gitorious.org/mediawiki-wikia-rte
The 'master' branch is a straight git-svn clone of the subtree; 'tweaks' branch has some extra doc comments and some initial tweaks to get it loading (if not actually working right yet ;) on stock MediaWiki 1.18-SVN.
Current state: * most stuff won't work yet! * the editor can be loaded if forced with &useeditor=wysiwyg * load/save results in some corruption, probably mostly due to the parser annotations not all being present (need to customize a few bits) * the editor is loaded through ResourceLoader, using a quick stub to work around the lack of removal of certain lines * it's almost certain that the CSS and some JS is broken :D * there are various Wikia-specific PHP-side and JS-side extensions, many of which still need to be switched to the stock MW equivalent or copied over. Note that definitions for such things can usually be found in the modified MediaWiki core in Wikia's SVN tree -- https://svn.wikia-code.com/wikia/trunk/
At a minimum I'd like to end up with something that works on stock MediaWiki 1.18 (and if it can be made to work on stock or lightly-patched 1.17, even better!). It should be a more stable option for 1.17 users than the old FCKEditor extension.
I'm still a bit leery of the internal annotations & edge-case checks for the round-tripping and whether this structure would work for us in the long term, but there's some good stuff in here that's going to be useful to learn from whatever we do, and it's a useful tool for many cases in the short term.
If anybody feels like trying it out / pitching in on the fixes, do feel free to give a shout. I can set a few folks up with commit access on the git repo or take some pulls for now, and will merge it into our SVN extensions when it's a bit more stable.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)