Comments on: Ramping Up on Mediawiki

By: Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 05:29:23 +0000

Thanks Andrew. Yes, there’s a login link in the sidebar for community members to log in and edit the content. I have about 70 volunteers who are focusing on the content on that wiki right now.

By: andrew

andrew — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 20:28:09 +0000

Tom,

Just had a look at the layout of the beta.lds.org site. It looks so incredibly clean compared to most wikis.

Do you allow your community members edit capability on the pages?

By: Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:32:34 +0000

I agree that it’s not ideal. Standards improve authoring. But all wikis have syntax somewhat like this.

By: Serendipity Seraph

Serendipity Seraph — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 10:50:55 +0000

I don’t get it. Non-WYSIWYG ad-hoc codes to format documents should be removed from all tools we use. This is the 21st century for crying out loud. This wiki-speak is one step from LaTeX but not nearly as powerful. I don’t understand why anyone touts this as a good thing. It is a waste of brainpower.

By: Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 06:22:51 +0000

I lobotomized the monobook skin. I was initially going to use a skin someone else had created, but from a corporate perspective, our skin needed to be our own. I didn’t want to run into copyright issues or attributions for derivative designs.

CSS is only one element in customizing the skin. You also have to figure out what all the PHP code is doing.

By: Evelyn

Evelyn — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:38:50 +0000

I didn’t know that Open office had a MediaWiki “save as” option – that’s brilliant!

And, I like how clean the skin is – did you start from scratch, or did you lobotomize the monobook skin? I’m new to css and am struggling with it.

By: Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:32:28 +0000

Evelyn, sorry for my slow response to your comment. We just launched the site I customized. You can see it here: https://tech.lds.org/ldshelp. I’m still making a lot of adjustments, and there isn’t hardly any content there yet. But it’s out there.

Re editing in a live web page model, you could edit the content in Open Office, and then export it to Mediawiki format. To do that, just go File > Export and in the Save as Type drop-down, select Mediawiki.

Tom

By: Evelyn

Evelyn — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 04:40:02 +0000

Hi Tom –
How goes the MediaWiki as HAT experiment? Any insights to share?

My company is using MediaWiki for the user support site, and it’s going well – MW is robust, and the many extensions and skinning options allow us to customize the user experience.

The thing I struggle with is the “editing-in-a-live-webpage” model. I’m using FireFox and the “It’s All Text” extension to capture the article in a text file, which gives some backup (should the web page accidentally get closed or I lose the connection to the internet).

But I wonder if there isn’t a better way? I’d like to find a way to “version” the wiki…edit it offline then load an update to go along with software releases.

Any advice would be appreciated.
Best,