The Visual Editor for MediaWiki relies on the Parsoid extension [1] AND the Parsoid service. The Parsoid service is a node.js server that interacts with the mediawiki API.
"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.
Installation
You'll need at least MediaWiki v1.23. I personally run the same version that they're running on mediawiki.org (1.24wmf3 greg.rundlett (talk) 19:39, 9 May 2014 (UTC))
WebFaction
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. I chose to install 'node' (which is now it's own one-click install) and also installing another 'app' to open up a port to use with the service. I had to export the PORT, but this is no longer necessary if you configure it in localsettings.js. Depending on the resource constraints of your hosting package, you may need to limit the number of workers spawned by the Parsoid service. It calculates a number based on the number of processors. For a shared hosting account, this is guaranteed to break, so specify the --num-workers option.
Follow the installation instructions, and remember to edit both LocalSettings.php and localsettings.js
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.
To have it run continuously, you might want to use the 'forever' module.
npm install forever
cd ~/webapps/wiki/extensions/Parsoid/
forever node api/server.js --num-workers=2 &
Extensions
API / Developer Docs / DevOps
- mw:Parsoid/Setup
- mw:Parsoid/Troubleshooting
- mw:Parsoid/Debugging
- mw:Parsoid/Packaging
- DevOps (Wikitech)
- 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)