[Mediawiki-l] Edittools installation

[rex]

After hours of reading, trying, failing, re-reading, trying, and
failing I'm asking for help.

It all started when I wanted to do a seemingly simple thing: use mdash
(and occasionally ndash) instead of hyphens. IMO, typing "—" to
insert a frequently used single character is very awkward and ugly, so
when I found a discussion about MediaWiki automatically converting "--"
to an mdash I thought my problem was solved. Alas, as far as I can
determine that feature was experimentally enabled very briefly and
quickly disabled because it breaks table syntax. If my understanding of
this is wrong, please let me know because typing "--" (or "---" to be
compatible with TeX [1]) to represent mdash is a winner, IMO.

I eventually discovered Edittools, but I cannot make it work. I've
created a page: 

http://www.flightedbirds.org/fbwiki/index.php/Monobook.css

that appears as it should. I've installed Charinsert:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CharInsert

Brian, you've got a cool tool there (no pun intended), but lots of
people are not going to realize that your line:

require_once("$IP/extensions/CharInsert/CharInsert.php"); 

addition to the LocalSettings.php also requires them to create a
CharInsert directory under the extensions directory, and to copy the
CharInsert.php file there. Yes, it's blindingly obvious to you, but it
isn't to lots of people. I see this scenario over-and-over again, where
authors post directions that seem obvious to them, but they are not to
most people, and the result is a huge number of posts that could have
been avoided by the original author not assuming everyone is not
up-to-speed and taking a little extra time to explain step-by-step what
needs to be done. 

Bottom line: I'm stuck. I've installed everything needed to get the
enhanced edit options, yet they don't appear when I edit a page.

Another issue: I'm the site admin. If I can't make the enhanced editing
work, what chance does the typical user have to make it work? IMHO, the
wiki admin should have the option of enabling it for everyone.

[1] Donald Knuth (the creator of TeX) is a giant. MediaWikia developers
would be wise to follow his lead in using "--" to represent ndash and
"---" to represent mdash. 
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2006/mayjun/features/knuth.html

-rex
-- 
When all else fails, try Tequila...