Best option for a Wiki text editor to keep the original markup?

Question

We have a need for a web-wiki-like rich editor that can preserve the original markup. At the moment, this custom markup is being converted to html for display and editing (allowing people to edit html in case of links, etc.), and then reset back to a specific markup. This is obviously a tendency to make mistakes, not ideal.

The first big solution is a solution with pure javascript html (like TinyMCE ) and a more client-oriented solution with things like flash or silverlight , which allows us not to worry about html, etc.

What are the best options so far in your experience?

Answer 1

This is a long discussion. My advice is to use JavaScript with good XHTML output. Do not use flash or silver light.

In my project, I used the YUI text editor, and everything worked very well. Try it here: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/editor/skinning_editor.html

Try this link, this is a really good comparison of web editors to get what you need:

• http://geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/WebEditors
• http://blog.webdistortion.com/2008/03/09/9-of-the-best-rich-text-editors-reviewed/

Answer 2

Users and the environment in which data is used have something to say. HTML is a presentation format, so its use for editing content in it is suboptimal. In many cases, you need to separate the content from the presentation, and then HTML will cause you problems because of this. You can, of course, try to limit the input to a subset of HTML, but it's hard to do it right, and it cripples the idea in the first place, because the input signal is no longer really wysiwyg. CMS struggled with this problem for many years, so I think there is no easy solution.

If you are editors - they are experienced users (probably programmers, but I had success with a mere mortal), you can use them to enter content in the markdown method or in a similar content-oriented format, and then convert it to HTML during presentation. The biggest obstacle to this approach seems to be the lack of real-time preview (wysiwyg). I used Showdown to render real-time preview, for example, this site - and I recently made a widget for a kind of hybrid wysiwyg input type that you may find applicable.

Answer 3

At Mozilla, they worked on this:

Mozilla bespin

Answer 4

You may not need to allow direct HTML editing if you use something like Markdown or Textile - users will always work with a textual representation of the content, while a one-time one-time conversion to one-sided text in html will be available for more pleasant HTML views -pages.

There are a number of Ruby Gems to help you implement Markdown and Textile plain-text-to-html conversions, if necessary. There are also some good markdown editors (like the one that uses SO).

In my opinion, text editing (in Markdown, Textile or similar) is a good and better choice in most cases. This is definitely a very easy and standardized method for creating rich content, although Markdown, Textile, etc. They do not cover all possible formatting options; the simple text path deserves serious consideration.

You can also see here at StackOverflow that Markdown uses for questions and answers that it is worthy. I strongly support the need to see "formatting tags" because WYSIWYG almost always leads to erroneous / unnecessary tags. In addition, the use of text formats allows you to have 100% control over the resulting HTML .

If you should use WYSIWYG, my experience with TinyMCE was decent enough to recommend it.

Answer 5

We use Screwturn to develop knowledge-based interspecific pages for our developers. I would say that this is a decent free wiki tool.

Answer 6

I would suggest using a Javascript based editor. There are many of them, and they are really good. I find flash / java / active x / etc. Editors are slow and clumsy compared to JS editors.

Some JS editors I like:

• FCKeditor
• Tinymce

Answer 7

I personally love TinyMCE.

When using TinyMCE, I can refer to the BB code. The text displayed in real time in the BB code editor in the editor, so that it looks bold or whatever style you want.

Save it in the format of the BB code of the database, and then when replacing the text, the line will be replaced.

If you want standard wiki markup, you can probably create your own plugin that does the wiki code.

Answer 8

The javascript editor that comes with WordPress is great.