[Mediawiki-l] Re: External editor support.

[Rick DeNatale]

On 10/13/05, Jim Higson <jh at 333.org> wrote:
> Jamie Bliss wrote:
>
> > Jim Higson wrote:
> >> Can anyone give advice on the new external editor features, maybe
> >> mediawiki could see my project as an external editor? I've found some
> >> pages about this, but not any real documentation of the interface on the
> >> http/soap/whatever level.
> >
> > [[m:Help:External editors/Tech]] talks about the data format.
> >
> > Basically, when a user clicks on an edit link (or a request with
> > &externaledit=true is made), it will send this file (with the mentioned
> > MIME type) as the body of the response. The idea is to associate this
> > type with an app that can understand it.
>
> Thanks Jamie.
>
> Is that the whole story...? So, is it the role of the external editor to do
> the uploading etc when the editing is finished? This seems unlikely since
> very few editors will know how to do this. If so, how are editTokens etc
> handled?

No, it's not the whole story. See

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:External_editors

It's not an arbitrary editor which needs to be associated with the
mime-type, but a helper app which understands the control file which
mediawiki serves up for external editing, and invokes the real
external editor, and saves the resource when needed.  Different
external editors can be invoked for different types of resources. For
example a text editor for articles, inkscape for svg illustrations,
the Gimp for images etc.

There's a reference implementation of the helper app writting in perl,
which can be found in the referenced article.  A quick skim of the
code looks like it forks the particular editor to edit a temp file,
and puts up a separate save window which the user uses to initiate
saving.  The helper app talks to the mediawiki server by emulating an
http client (it tells the server that the agent is firefox 1.0).

It doesn't seem to monitor the editor process, so the user has to do a
save in the editor, then push the 'save' or 'save and continue'
buttons in the helper app's gui.  Seems a little clumsy, but I guess
you could do differently should you decide to write your own helper
app implementation.

Keep in mind that all of this requires a fair bit of configuration on
the client.
--
Rick DeNatale

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