Mediawiki is the engine that powers Wikipedia. It’s a wiki and it’s used to create collaborative websites where people can share knowledge and keep all sorts of information.
They make it possible for people to work on the same document.
Personally I keep most of my information in Mediawiki websites.
Mediawiki is very good to create intranets, website used internally in an organization.
Many people find editing wiki pages difficult. Even if you get a standard tool bar and you don’t have to remember wiki syntax, there are some things that are difficult to edit and maintain.
Tables are one of them. it’s easy to create a table because Mediawiki offers a wizard that guides you. But it’s not so easy to edit the table, to add rows and columns, to edit the content.
A WYSIWYG editor is, in general, an editor that makes it easier to work on a document.
In our case a WYSIWYG editor hides Mediawiki syntax so that you don’t have to remember it at all. You just edit the document in the same way you would edit a document created with a word processor.
Visual Editor is our WYSIWYG editor. Wikipedia uses it as well.
The starting point to find information about it is its Mediawiki extension page.
Before installing Visual Editor, we have to install Parsoid. It’s a server process that converts HTML code into Mediawiki syntax and back.
The WYSIWYG editor works on HTML code. It keeps our editing activity in HTML form. But it has to eventually convert that HTML into Mediawiki syntax otherwise Mediawiki won’t be able to store it.
When it has to save a page to Mediawiki database, Visual Editor takes the HTML version of the document and gives it to Parsoid. The latter converts it into Mediawiki syntax and Visual Editor gives that syntax to Mediawiki for it to store in the database.
The package
To install Parsoid we need to add a repository to our Debian software sources. My server runs Debian Jessie (version 8).
echo "deb https://releases.wikimedia.org/debian jessie-mediawiki main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/parsoid.list
You may have to add an authentication key to access the repository. This is generally done with a command like the following one:
sudo apt-key advanced --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 90E9F83F22250DD7
The actual key may be different.
Now let’ install the package.
root@FREEDOMANDCOURAGE:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# sudo apt-get update
root@FREEDOMANDCOURAGE:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# sudo apt-get install parsoid
You may need to install the package apt-transport-https as well.
There are many files to configure for Parsoid to work.
Config.yaml
The main one if config.yaml (/etc/mediawiki/parsoid/config.yaml).
You find there a line like this:
http://localhost/w/api.php
This is needed for Parsoid to access Mediawiki apis. Parsoid uses Mediawiki apis to return the result of the conversions it performs.
I have many websites on my server. I need to replace localhost with my Mediawiki installation domain.
Something like mediawiki.example.com. Your domain will be different.
In my case api.php is directly on the root of the website. Like http://mediawiki.example.com/api.php. If you browse to your api.php, you get some help information, if it’s working.
LocalSettings.php
We have to add lines to the LocalSettings.php file of our Mediawiki installation.
This Mediawiki installation is private. It’s like an intranet. You need userid and password to access it.
This means that Parsoid needs to be authorized to access Mediawiki when it sends back to Mediawiki the result of the conversions it performs.
This is what we do first thing in our LocalSettings.php file.
The line with the URL to the Parsoid instance is interesting. It tells us that Parsoid is a server process listening on port 8142. Mediawiki will contact it at that port when needing to convert HTML code into Mediawiki syntax.
Also the line about forwarding cookies is essential for Parsoid to work with a private Mediawiki installation.
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(full article: WYSIWYG editor for Mediawiki)