Hello, I am one of the developers of MeanEditor (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MeanEditor).
I see our editor has been nominated on http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Extension_Survey/Extension_Nomination. While I recognize MeanEditor is not yet ready for deployment on wikimedia servers, we would like the basic idea (a visual editor for simple features only, focusing on clean edits and clean diffs) to be considered in the WYSIWYG survey. Therefore, I thought you might want some information on its status.
Unfortunately we do not have time to work on it right now, but we should have plenty next month. MeanEditor is currently based on WYMeditor 0.4, which means browser support is not optimal (FF and IE only). We plan to port it to the WYMeditor 0.5 branch, which works on all current browsers.
The requirement to patch the MediaWiki code can be lifted (although I still think MediaWiki needs a more flexible support for custom editors) by creating a patched EditPage.php and supplying the modified file through the CustomEditor hook. We initially chose to create a patch because we felt it was a cleaner solution (at that time we were considering proposing it for integration with MediaWiki). We used PHP (instead of JavaScript) because it is easier to integrate server-side code with the exisiting parser.
Details on the ideas behind MeanEditor are on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MeanEditor. Any feedback is welcome. -- Jacopo Corbetta and Alessandro Pignotti http://allievi.sssup.it/jacopo/MeanEditor/
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