On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 6:45 AM, James Forrester jdforrester@gmail.com wrote:
On 24 August 2012 06:29, Andrew Martin martopolis@gmail.com wrote:
I was wondering if there was a way to enable to VisualEditor in the Main namespace for 3rd-party wikis, or if an ETA is known for when users will able to do that?
This is possible, but I would not recommend it. Firstly, because there is a lot of missing functionality in VisualEditor right now, and which won't "round-trip" cleanly if left alone (for example, categories or template transclusions). Also, VisualEditor depends on Parsoid to convert between wikitext and HTML, which as well as being incomplete, the team are currently re-writing from NodeJS into C++.
One idea we've been kicking around here is the idea that, for brand new wikis, instead of storing wikitext, we could offer an alternate configuration where we store the HTML5+RDFa representation instead of wikitext, thus making Parsoid an optional feature rather than a requirement for running MediaWiki. This approach means that editors on a wiki using VisualEditor without Parsoid would not be able to edit wikitext at all.
The upside of this approach is simplicity for both editors and administrators. The downside of this approach is that it will be a while before VisualEditor will be able to support enough of the features of wikitext such that *all* editors can forego direct wikitext access and still have a fully-functional wiki. So, this idea is (I think) still in the "hey, maybe we could do that" stage rather than a fixed part of the plan.
Rob