Installing a WYSIWYG editor in MediaWiki
One of the things that I wanted to get set up in our wiki test-bed was a WYSIWYG editor for wiki pages. You might find yourself asking “why would you want to have a WYSWIYG editor in a wiki when there is wiki-markup”? The reason I wanted to install a WYSIWYG editor is that although wiki-markup isn’t difficult to learn, it does create a learning curve for users. I really wanted my wiki users to be able to easily create wiki pages. If you visit the MediaWiki site you will find a page that discusses options for installing a WYSIWYG editor into MediaWiki. The two main server-side options are to install TinyMCE or FCKeditor. Each of these has their own set of instructions and requirements. Here’s a breakdown of the similarities and differences.
Similarities:
- You must use wiki-markup to specify hyperlinks and insert images
Differences:
- With FCKeditor you have to make significant changes to the MediaWiki code to make things work. This isn’t good when having to deal with upgrades.
- TinyMCE requires that you have Perl installed as well as the HTML::WikiConverter and HTML::WikiConverter:MediaWiki perls module and their dependencies
- With FCKeditor HTML is stored in the database which makes it easier to take that code back out of the database and use it on a page.
- With TinyMCE everything is stored in the database as wiki-markup, limiting how you can format items on the page.
I decided to use FCKeditor as my WYSIWYG editor for Mediawiki. There are several reason for this choice. First, I wanted HTML to be stored in the database. My personal opinion is that this should make any future migration of the stuff out of wiki software easier. Also I’m hoping it will make migration from wiki software another easier (that is if the wiki software supports HTML). Second, I chose FCKEditor because it seemed to support a wider variety of HTML and CSS than TinyMCE. What I mean by this is because it keep everything in HTML in the database you can use inline styles to format your page. You can also use divs and spans successfully. I have some trouble using these in the TinyMCE extension for Mediawiki. This isn’t an issue with TinyMCE but rather how it has been implemented as an extension to Mediawiki. Lastly, I didn’t want to have to install Perl and a bunch of Perl modules to have my WYSIWYG editor to work properly. This is particularly problematic if you don’t have any other reason to have Perl running on your server. I’m using Perl on the server for other things right now. However, I don’t want to be tied to having it on the server if the other application I’m using it for goes away. One major disadvantages to this approach is that upgrades to Mediawiki may break my install completely because this extension actually alters the Mediawiki codebase. Which means I can’t do any upgrades without making sure that there is an update to this extension or making sure that the upgrade doesn’t touch the files altered in this plugin. This is far from ideal and I’m hoping perhaps that normal WYSIWYG functionality will come as an embedded option in a future version of Mediawiki.
I’m struggling with the same issue for this site. Instead of FCKeditor or TinyMCE i’ve got my eye on wikiwyg, an editor that sits right between wikicode and wysiwyg.
As it seems it already works pretty well with MediaWiki, except saving pages is still a problem. See more here .
so what was the outcome of this experiment? Was Fck a good choice? Have Fck upgrades since then been better?
Try the MoinMoin wiki. It comes with a built in FCKEditor which produces wiki syntax as output. Works pretty well.
Soeren
We have just started a project called MediaWiki+FCKeditor. Check it out:
http://mediawiki.fckeditor.net
I hope you’ll enjoy it.
FredCK
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Frederico Caldeira Knabben
Project Manager, FCKeditor
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http://www.fckeditor.net
I’ve been researching to find the most stable, easy for users solution for a WYSIWYG interface for this MediaWiki site I’m building. So far the best choice I’ve seen seems to be the official Media Wiki + FCKeditor project that Frederico is discussing above me. I’m using MW 1.10.1 That MoinMoin wiki sounds awesome too though but requires me to start over :( Is MoinMoin that Python based wiki which is supposed to be pretty good?
Media Wiki + FCKeditor is a very good solution if you are not using Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, most companies only has IE6 or IE7 installed. This is where “Media Wiki + FCKeditor” have a great tendency to crash IE. One example is when you include a spanned table anywhere, IE will either crash or gave a Javascript error. Bug report has been filed since 09/10/07 but no fix in sight. There is also quite a bit of open ticket at http://dev.fckeditor.net/report/12. Seem like the “Media Wiki + FCKeditor” project is not the top priority for the FCKeditor team.
If your server uses Linux, you will ALWAYS have perl installed. You cannot get a server without it. Perl is the basis for many linux tools, so it has become a core requirement for any Linux installation.
I was disturbed by the seemingly lovely picture at the top of this page (misty.jpg).
Look closely, the horizon is higher on the LHS than the middle. I rotated the image a few degrees using The Gimp and it looked much better.
Certainly a wysiwyg editor for wiki pages is the biggest barrier to the average (l)user using a wiki. Personally, I have no problem with editing wiki markup.