[pmwiki-users] Pre-alpha rich text WYSIWTF editor

[Petko Yotov]

Here:

  http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/WTF      (click on the "Edit" link)

This may one day become a "Rich text" editor that could be used with PmWiki. 
This is a very early pre-alpha release, after a single day of work. Many 
things can be improved.

WYSIWYG editing reduces the types of customizations that can be performed. 
Some PmWiki markups like include, pagelist, attachlist, the gallery recipes, 
do not have a direct analogue in HTML and cannot be "edited" in WYSIWYG.
It also restricts the browsers that can perform editing: recent desktop 
browsers should be able to edit, but older/mobile/kiosk/exotic/text-only 
browsers probably couldn't.

On the other hand, the wiki markup is a great pain for newcomers. New wiki 
users have to read some documentation before and while they are editing; they 
need time and concentration for this, and they tend to forget if they do not 
edit very often.

What if people could start editing without the need to read and remember the 
documentation? This article claims that adding a WYSIWYG editor to an intranet 
wiki got eight times the participation:
  http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2011/01/04/

Our current 1-day implementation uses a modified WhizzyWig JavaScript editor. 
WhizzyWig is very small and fast (less than 35K including styles and images) 
compared to other editors like TinyMCE, CKEditor or Xinha.
Headings, text styles and colors, links, images, lists, tables can be added. 
HTML is stored in the wiki page.

A special type of <pre> blocks allow the use of PmWiki markup.

If you like, you can use the dedicated wikigroup on pmwiki.org for testing, 
and/or you can install the recipe on your own wiki (in an empty group, after 
backup). I'll have more time to work on the recipe this weekend, meanwhile 
comments and bug reports will be welcome.

Petko
P.S. Everything can change.