Comments on: Outlining in MediaWiki

By: Jon

Jon — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:05:15 +0000

Chomped link was http://dev.jmtd.net/outliner/ (commits currently broken)

By: Jon

Jon — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:04:41 +0000

Following on from Don’s comment: Ikiwiki currently has an “opl” plugin, so it can interpret and render OPL lists into HTML. However, it lacks any kind of intelligent editor, yet, so if you wanted to edit the OPL via the ikiwiki web interface, you would be hacking on it inside a TEXTAREA. Of course, this isn’t a problem if you just clone the wiki source and open it up in your outliner.

I’ve been working on-and-off on a javascript outliner plugin for ikiwiki which would let you create lists in the web interface more easily. It’s a long way off useful, though.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 04:54:27 +0000

Have you seen http://context.punkave.com/ ?

By: Bill Seitz

Bill Seitz — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:13:04 +0000

Will other people be able to edit these pages? Will you/other people be able to edit pages directly (e.g. without the outlining tool)? This makes things a bit tricker as you need to handle “broken” wiki-text when sucking it into the outliner.

By: Bill Seitz

Bill Seitz — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:07:52 +0000

Within a given node, are you satisfied with plaintext editing (e.g. using the wiki-specific pseudo-tags for links, italics, etc)?

By: Don Marti

Don Marti — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:25:40 +0000

Doc, you might want to check out Ikiwiki, which you might call “the wiki that gets along with your other software” or maybe “the lazy wiki that makes other software do most of the work”. Ikiwiki uses a revision control system as the back end. So any application with a hook to commit into the revision control system will update the wiki, too–auto-freaking-magically. The other k3wl thing about ikiwiki is that you can add any input format by writing a plugin — so you can have the wiki work from your outliner’s native format. So that means the critical path from where you are now to total outliner/wiki smoothness is (1) a revision control hook for your outliner and (2) an ikiwiki plugin to handle your outliner’s native format.

By: Christina

Christina — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:14:07 +0000

I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re asking, but OpenOffice has an “export to MediaWiki” option–which means that you can edit something in it using a friendly WYSIWIG interface and it’ll do all the Wiki formatting for you. I mostly use it to convert the minutes I take with Tomboy notes (which export to HTML) to MediaWiki format–works like a charm!

By: Craig Box

Craig Box — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:54:20 +0000

Should have added a link to the open source community for it: http://wiki.developer.mindtouch.com/MindTouch_Deki. MindTouch also provide a commercially supported version for those who want/need it, so the OSS version isn’t currently very easy to find from the mindtouch.com website.

By: Craig Box

Craig Box — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:51:47 +0000

Look at MindTouch Deki (originally a MediaWiki fork), which has two useful characteristics here: (a) its API is completely separate from its’ frontend (the frontend is just an API client), so you could use any editor of your choice and a simple REST API; and (b) the markup language is XHTML, so you can use any editor of your choice and don’t have to worry about wikitext. You can also edit just one section (as defined in your outline by headings) at a time.

Plus, a built-in scripting language (DekiScript) lets you massage your data in any way you want. Some potential uses – include sections of a page from another page; templating; pulling data from other sources, processing and displaying – a.k.a. the Web 2.0 ‘mashup’.

By: Ilan

Ilan — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:15:07 +0000

Doc,

The API for deki www.mindtouch.com) would probably be friendly to this type of integration.

Ilan