Many people who run MediaWiki wikis have expressed interest in having a Creole parser for their wikis, including Evan Podromou, one of the admins of WikiTravel. Tim Starling wrote:
- I am personally not intending to implement any kind of WikiCreole support in MediaWiki, but I would welcome such support if someone implemented it and submitted it. I support the model of having an alternative parser as an installation option, not the "easy edit" model. -
So, I would like to ask, would anyone be interested in developing the alternative Creole parser for MediaWiki? The idea is that admins of MediaWiki wikis could decide when they set up a wiki whether they would prefer to use traditional MediaWiki markup or Creole. If anyone would be willing to write such a parser for us, we would greatly appreciate it.
We have created a page at http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/MediaWiki to be used for discussions of planning an implementation of Creole for MediaWiki.
Best wishes, Chuck
So, I would like to ask, would anyone be interested in developing the alternative Creole parser for MediaWiki?
I don't remember anyone volunteering last time we discussed it. It's a massive task, probably months of work. Someone interested in writing a parser from scratch would probably do better spending their time re-writing the MediaWiki parser (which is probably a larger job, but I expect it would be more useful - I'm not sure, though, since I don't even understand the parser well enough to truly understand the problems with it).
It's a massive task, probably months of work.
I don't think so - I'd bet a determined hacker could do it in a much shorter time given what's already available.
A while back I put together an extension to ease the difficulty in swapping in alternative syntax engines:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AlternateSyntaxParser
It comes with built-in support for Textile and Markdown, but it also adds a hook called 'AlternateSyntaxParser' for extensibility. A wikicreole implementation might look like like this:
---------------------------------------- $wgAlternateSyntaxParserLanguage = 'WIKICREOLE'; $wgHooks['AlternateSyntaxParser'][] = 'wikiCreoleParser'; function wikiCreoleParser( &$parser, &$text, $lang ) { if ($lang!='WIKICREOLE') return true; // somehow render the wikicreole text in $text into $rendered_text $text = $rendered_text; return false; } ----------------------------------------
There's already a PEAR Package for parsing wikicreole text (or so the download page would have me believe - there's no official documentation that I could find):
http://pear.php.net/package/Text_Wiki_Creole/download/All
I'm not an expert on PEAR, so I can't be sure if this would be an acceptable engine, but if it is - then the project would appear to be a simple plumbing job at this point ;)
-- Jim R. Wilson (jimbojw)
On 8/14/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
So, I would like to ask, would anyone be interested in developing the alternative Creole parser for MediaWiki?
I don't remember anyone volunteering last time we discussed it. It's a massive task, probably months of work. Someone interested in writing a parser from scratch would probably do better spending their time re-writing the MediaWiki parser (which is probably a larger job, but I expect it would be more useful - I'm not sure, though, since I don't even understand the parser well enough to truly understand the problems with it).
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// somehow render the wikicreole text in $text into $rendered_text
That's the bit that takes the time. Writing a parser that works correctly in every case is quite a task. Integrating it into MediaWiki is easy by comparison. I guess if there is an existing GPL WikiCreole parser, that could be integrated directly, but I don't know of one.
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org