Visual editor

The Visual Editor for MediaWiki relies on the Parsoid extension .

"Parsoid implements a bidirectional wikitext parser and interpreter. It

converts and interprets wikitext into an annotated HTML DOM, which can then be edited with HTML editor tools such as the Visual Editor. It also provides the conversion

of a (possibly modified) HTML DOM back to wikitext."

Robin Cover would be proud. It round-trips wiki to HTML and back.

Parsoid brings node.js to mediawiki. To install the visual editor extension in a webfaction account, you need to first have node installed and working. You can do this by using the installer in your webfaction panel and associating a path with the app for a domain.

You'll want to set/update your $NODE_PATH and $PATH environment variables to locate the installed node modules, and to find the node and npm binaries

export NODE_PATH="$HOME/webapps/node/lib/node_modules:$NODE_PATH"
echo 'export NODE_PATH="$HOME/webapps/node/lib/node_modules:$NODE_PATH"' >> $HOME/.bashrc
which npm
export PATH="$HOME/webapps/node/bin:$PATH"
echo 'export PATH="/$HOME/webapps/node/bin:$PATH"' >> $HOME/.bashrc

Once node (and npm) is available, you of course need to get the parsoid and visual_editor extensions. A quick npm install in the parsoid directory sets up all the node machinery.

API / Developer Documentation

• https://doc.wikimedia.org/VisualEditor/master/ powered by JSDuck
• http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.wikitext wikitext-l

I noticed a bug and it was fixed about 5 minutes after I mentioned it! (Thanks C. Scott Ananian)

HyperText Markup Language = structured text that uses logical links (hyperlinks) between nodes containing text.

Application Programming Interface