Thought [on web page]

[MidKnight]

I agree entirely -- minimalist intro pages are the future!

[Imagine an "I'm with Coco" photoshoop here]

I'm with AF!

[smoth]

TinyMCE would be a massive blessing.

so why is TinyMCE so good? What does it do?

[Forboding Angel]

^^TinyMCE + ------- Sink + HTML


^^ Wiki format

Do I really need to go into detail?

Also, you can copy and paste from ANYWHERE and TinyMCE will HTMLize it and display it correctly. To do that using wiki format, you would have to first sanitize the text, then reformat it, then add the images. 5 seconds vs 30 minutes.

Wiki formatting isn't HTML, it isn't css, it's just garbage mashed together pretending to "work".

You know my mapping tutorial (outdated, yes we all know), you could take that, and copy and paste it verbatim into TinyMCE and bam you're done.

Leading to the point that forum posts could be wiki-ized in 5 seconds or less. Do I need to explain why that would be an awesome edition?

[Forboding Angel]

Hmm, didn't mean to sound rude about it...

[AF]

Oh dear lord, what did you do to your tinymce?! A font dropdown?!? That's what your stylesheets are for dear sir, consistency!!

I heartily recommend you add an editor stylesheet to your theme.



In your functions.php:

Code: Select all

add_editor_style('editor.css');

Converting the wiki into WordPress pages and adding wiki plugins, is not the solution. This would change:

• Great mangled mess built on mediawiki

Into a:

• Great mangled mess built on WordPress

Instead, things like unit tags, etc, would be better done as custom post types and taxonomies, that way the data and the presentation/navigation are disconnected, processable, and easier to update and add metadata such as version introduced, deprecation etc.

But as I said earlier, such an effort would need to become the default through the process of competition with the existing wiki. People won't use/support it unless it's better, and that needs to be proven.

[smoth]

so what is required to set this thing up? is it free?

[Forboding Angel]

AF Occasionally you need an inline style (omg the horror!). If it's going to be used once and only once, it's a little silly to create a css class for it.

Also, the tools you are ignoring are div tools, table tools, layer tools, and so on.

Being able to copy pasta forum posts verbatim may insert a bunch of divs and crap that won't be seen but... who cares? It's on it's own page. 10kb worth of style garbage that isn't used won't cause any real harm, and we both know that cleaning up text and reformatting it in tinymce is lightyears faster than trying to do it is mediawiki's poor excuse for a gui.

BTW the plugin is tinymce advanced. It just adds everything that tinymce can do, and is infinitely useful. Otherwise occasionally I have to look up html tags that I rarely use on w3c schools to make sure I'm using them right (not often but if I do, toolbar generally saves me a lot of trouble, plus the table generator is quite wonderful).

@smoth, TinyMCE is the default built in editor for wordpress. There is a mod to insert it into mediawiki, but with the way the spring site is set up (lolgit), testing integration is not easy. Usually TinyMCE is simple to integrate, you just attach it to all textareas and give it a target. Problem with integrating it into mediawiki is mediawiki and wikis in general are so ass backwards it turns what should be a simple task into a great chore.

I guarantee that you will get a lot more people contributing to the wiki if TinyMCE is involved.

[AF]

When you copy paste and you get divs that can and does have repercussions, in the past I've had broken pages thanks to that, and thats before I get into invalid html e.g. divs that haven't been closed etc.

It also makes it a nightmare to deal with styling changes if in line styles are used in content. What's more it's almost entirely unnecessary.

In practice a good page stylesheet will work welland serve its purpose. If you need to highlight something, use the correct html tags for it and style accordingly in your stylesheet, <em>emphasise</em> <strong>strong points</strong>, <span style="color:pink; font-weight:bold;">But if you even need t do this then you're clearly either doing something wrong</style>" or demonstrating the pain of inline styling.

I've built numerous sites and my colleagues have built sites, all of which have hundreds of posts, sub blogs, and hundreds of thousands of views, and the only time that we really need to bother with inline faffery is embedding iframes (I would say flash, but oembed handles it all rather nicely these days).

If in your page you really need to highlight an element, give it an ID. If <em> (the emphasis tag) doesn't provide enough emphasis, or you havemultiple levels of emphasis, then you're content needs rewording and adjusting, it's the equivilant of shouting at different volumes.


Content is content, layout and style is the themes job.

[FLOZi]

I strongly urge that we leave the wiki well alone. A WYSIWYG editor and HTML is not a good idea for a wiki meant primarily for documentation. If you can't see why then I am blown away.

edit: And if you don't see why - everything that AF said.

[AF]

If you disagree with Flozi or myself, please create an alternative system. When the alternative system is the defacto standard, then we can think about decommissioning the wiki install.

Anything else risks us loosing information or introducing a maintenance fiasco.

No doubt someone (including probably myself) will attempt this. Any recreation will need to be integrated into the wiki so we dont have two incomplete lists.

[Forboding Angel]

Yes, because this:

Is perfectly reasonable markup.

I strongly urge that we leave the wiki well alone. A WYSIWYG editor and HTML is not a good idea for a wiki meant primarily for documentation.

Leaving the wiki alone will result in the same 3 people actually bothering to fuck with it, if even that many.

If you want progress, you have to be capable of dealing with, and accepting change.


Wiki syntax is shit, and anyone who disagrees with that is a moron. Html is html is hypertext markup language.

[AF]

I'm no fan at all of the mediawiki syntax, and tinymce has its benefits but:

• Did you never wonder why WordPress took those things out of their tinyMCE toolbar? It wasn't just clutter, and it certainly wasn't technical limitations
• So we copy the wiki into WordPress, now we're stuck with the same problem we had before, the documentations all over the place, out of date here and there, and nobodies quite sure what's right and what isn't
• Assuming all the content is correct, and we copy paste it all into WordPress, that's still a lot of inline styling, that would clash utterly with the WordPress theme, slowdown editing, and introduce allsorts of hiccups. It's still unprocessed data.

Something more like this would be better:

[AF]

For reference here is my springdocs installation, though I stopped working on it a while ago. If I were to work on it further I would scrap that theme and redesign the UI

http://springdocs.darkstars.co.uk/api_c ... efinition/

[Forboding Angel]

So basically, if a button is there on the toolbar, you can't keep yourself from clicking it?

Yeah, of course there would/could still be clutter, BUT, in moving it over we could *gasp* clean it up!

*heartattack*

[FLOZi]

Leaving the wiki alone will result in the same 3 people actually bothering to fuck with it, if even that many.

And breaking it all for a vanity project will result in 0 people bothering to fuck with it.

[AF]

Who would copy it over, and how is it to be organised when the content takes the form of prose and is in no way structured?

Also look at Powerpoint and MS Word and what people do with the hundreds of options. Yes you can have 101 buttons, but that isn't always a good thing. Millions of WordPress sites get along just fine without, if you really need them, maybe you're trying to solve the wrong problem

[Jazcash]

Yes, because this:

Is perfectly reasonable markup.

This is the exact, one and only reason I have never contributed to the wiki. Sure it would be possible after a lot of trial and error and looking up mediawiki syntax but when it came down to it, I just could never be bothered. Not when I have proper WYSIWYG editors on more complete CMSs.

[knorke]

Leaving the wiki alone will result in the same 3 people actually bothering to fuck with it, if even that many.

I guarantee that you will get a lot more people contributing to the wiki if TinyMCE is involved.

That sounds obvious at first but I think it is wrong. People who cba to look up how to edit wiki text are imo unlikely to contribute anything.
It really is not hard and 99% of the time you do only need:
head lines
bold text, cursive text
links
Holy batman!

Are that some buttons in the wiki? Oooh yeah and there are some more.

This is the exact, one and only reason I have never contributed to the wiki.

Except you did.
And you even used formating and lists and stuff. And hey, even emmanuel managed.

So sometimes it is a bit scary that to get this:

you have to type this:

Code: Select all

* '''<code>blocking</code>''' - type: <code>bool</code> - default: <code>true</code>
: Does the unit block the movement of other units? (Mines, i.e. non-mobile units with the <code>kamikaze</code> tag default to <code>false</code>)

But wait, type? Ooooh copy pasta and only change the words/content.

Better than have to mark one word, click "make green", write next work, click "make bold" etc zzZzzz
(yes I notice there is some "html view" but that probally sucks more than any wiki text thing)

If you can quote an image on a forum without fucking up, you can edit wiki

People won't use/support it unless it's better, and that needs to be proven.

I am looking at the websites of evolutionrts, AF's website and BA website. None makes me think "wow this wordpress thing is great"

[AF]

I am looking at the websites of evolutionrts, AF's website and BA website. None makes me think "wow this wordpress thing is great"

The BA site and the Evo site are prepackaged themes with a handful of minor modifications. My site is old and already has a replacement lined up.

Eitherway judging a backend using the html and css skills of the designer who made the frontend is a terrible way of judging a piece of web software. It's liking looking at tutomod and using that as justification for calling all spring games chaotic and unappealing (tutomod has very very different goals in mind).

Here're far better examples of super shiny wordpress:

http://www.bigspaceship.com/
http://searchinsidevideo.com/#p1
http://icondock.com/
http://espiratecnologias.com/
http://css-tricks.com/
http://www.transformology.com/
http://www.abhaysingh.in/
http://www.altimea.com/#!/portfolio/iph ... -facebook/

[FLOZi]

Damn I wish phpbb had multiquote.

Jazcash: I don't mean to offend, but if the wiki is predominantly for content & engine development documentation (and it is) - what will you contribute?

knorke: The rather unpleasant bunch of markup there should probably be wrapped into a template (I'd keep the actual description outside probably? I intend to do this at some point):

Code: Select all

{{tagheader|name=THE_NAME|type=THE_TYPE|default=THE_DEFAULT}}

Furthermore, mediawiki is the de-facto standard, its hardly obscure dragons-be-here stuff is it.