Wikidot Community

I did not mention it but if we make a WYSIGYW editor you could switch between wiki syntax and WYSIWYG editing.

michal

Wykiwyg looks very promising for the future. I am not sure for now…

Indeed the idea is nice and it makes editing quite easy. The sample configurations however lack support for MANY wiki tags and offers the simplified interface. I do not know if it can be extended (I hope so) but at the same time it is not that difficult to write such an editor for wikidot. The problems are:

1. Wiki <—> HTML transformations (in both directions) — this is engine-dependent. And our engine can be easily extended to provide 2-way transformations.
2. Decisions to make about the way we edit. And this is important. More below.
3. Implement the javascript wysiwyg editing — I have been playing with the TinyMCE editor and I find it producing the high-quality HTML code. The way I see it is that we could make a fork of it or base our editor on TinyMCE.

Ok, now more on

How to edit

Currently the "edit" form always opens below the edited content and the preview always replaces the content leaving the form below. Other solution (like in http://www.wikisandbox.com/page/editor-test and the WikiWyg) open edit form that replaces the content. I personally do not like it this way but pehaps it would not be that bad. So you could switch between source/wysiwyg/preview.

I think I will create a wiki section related to development of the editor… anyone would like to help? The most important now is to decide how things should work and which solutions to use…

thanks — michal

I have thought about it and i didn't come to a satisfying conclusion.

Problems

• I for one tend to prefer the wiki syntax but i understand the argument: "I have this content to publish, why should i bother with cryptic symbols for that?"

• I had written a stylesheet for my site before there was any content. Now, as I write the first pages, i start to use local styles on DIVs or SPANs. This is somehow counterproductive.

I think the best would be to strike a balance between style based WYSIWYG and content|semantic based wiki syntax. I don't know how, though.

A vague idea: One could split the editor into a linear or tree-like sequence of blocks, which follows the logical order of the content (if there is any of course) much like the cells of a mathematica notebook. The user should be allowed to apply predefined or custom style classes to these cells. The cells in the editor, however, should be displayed in a non-styled plain form but without (or optional) inline wiki syntax.

I don't know whether this is helpful at all to make the indeed important decision about the way we edit.

I found, the most important point on the MediaWiki discussion is:

An editor should support the user in getting a headline right instead of using a big font, marking a citation instead of italicizing text, and so on. Imho most wysiwyg-editors lures people away from thinking about the meaning, and this is wrong. — ∂ 01:47, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

PS: I could vote more than once on these Quimble polls (?!)

I have been thinking a lot about the WYSIWYG too. The tree structure sounds great and would be really cool - it would allow you to controll the content and layout/structure much easier.

I will just point some of my thoughts which are related to your ideas but not only:

• I would preserve the final layout of divs in the editor, but each div or similar (configurable) block element would have either a (right-click) content menu to edit properties or a small tab/label "edit" which would allow to change CSS class/styles and other options such as left/right/center for images etc.
  structured view (tree) would be great here
• the toolbar would be context-aware. the options would change depending on in what element you are currently in or what is highlighted
• I do not think cells in the editor are good. I myself have found Mathematica notebooks quite counterintuitive. But anyway - I think that styled layout with borders (+labels) around certain block elements would be fine.

Now some examples I like but nothing that I like 100%:

• TinyMCE (http://www.tinymce.com) is great for producing high quality HTML code. It is very fool-proof and stable. we could use the core of tinymce for the editor. and later process the code back to the wiki syntax.
• Mozile (http://mozile.mozdev.org/, http://mozile.mozdev.org/0.8/demos/mediawiki.html) - nice idea but just an idea.
• Wikiwyg (http://demo.wikiwyg.net/wikiwyg/demo/clientserver/) - I like the inline editing and syntax/wysiwyg/preview switching
• WetPaint (http://www.wikisandbox.com/page/editor-test) - the implementation sucks but inspires. The toolbar disturbs editing a lot since it hovers the edit area.
• Google Docs (former Writely) (http://docs.google.com/) — the toolbar layout is great with edit/insert tabs
• PBwiki upcoming editor (http://www.flickr.com/photos/blake4tx/247774969/in/photostream/) - look how the elements are marked in the editing mode. Apparently they are using the FCKeditor (http://www.fckeditor.net/demo).

I think all these ideas could be combined ;-) somehow ;-)

Have you checked out JSPWiki? IIRC, it has a pluggable renderer. That is, within markup, you can change the renderer. It's been a while since I've looked at it, but IIRC it supports one of the standard wiki markup languages, and the plugin provides WYSIWYG editing.

This was a while ago (2.4 beta, I think).

Thanx for the info about JSPWiki. In fact the WYSIWYG editor is almost ready and quite unique — but needs internal testing.

michal

Yes, your experience is very similar to mine on this. However much I say "but editing pages is really no harder than using Microsoft Word" I get the "does it have a WYSIWYG editor?" question, as though WYSIWYG is the holy grail. Whilst I would probably use a such an editor only occasionally the provision of one would help to "sell" wikidot.

Rob

It'd be great if we were able to say "Wikidot does not have WYSIWYG but it is very close to it and easy enough". => http://community.wikidot.com/wishlist:49

I would like a wysywyg editor myself. I have been using wiki's for 8 years now (started with openwiki, now deceased). The wiki tags are no problem for me but I make mistakes because wikidot has a different syntax than mediawiki (we use at work).

I like the edit-function on wikispaces.com very much and it is my opinion that a wiki without wysiwyg-editing is simply not current anymore.

I started a wikidot wiki as I wanted to create a site for our group of friend to plan a ski-holiday early 2010. I know that at least 7 of them will not edit the site when they see the syntax you have to type. Me and 1 of my friends will use it. So it is destined to fail it purpose …

I have set the site up on wikispaces.com although wikidot has more features (forum, ect.) and no google ads but in my opinion WYSIWYG is a must …

Jeroen

Thanks Rob,

This will be very handy for my laptop, which currently does not have internet. :(

~ Paul

However, my STE text editor isn't WYSIWYG either…