Using Textile Markup with MediaWiki

MediaWiki is used extensively for documentation sites simply because it has so many features that make it ideal for this type of wiki application. The primary example is, of course Wikipedia

Naturally, I want to use MediaWiki for my own documentation sites. However, I use Textile – a lightweight, humane web text generator almost exclusively wherever HTML markup would otherwise be used. Also, I have to admit that I find the built-in MediaWiki markup verbose, ugly and counter-intuitive.

So, I was pleased to find a well written and documented MediaWiki extension which provides for alternative parsers, including textile. For some reason, the standard extension does not work on my sites. What I describe here is a simple mechanism to replace the TextilePHP parser with the Textile2 parser.

Step One

Install the MediaWiki AlternativeSyntaxParser extension. Test it and if it works for you you’re done!

Step 2

If the basic installation does not work, or if you want to try Textile2, add the following lines to AlternativeSyntaxParser.php at about line #153

 case 'textile2':
    require_once('classTextile.php');
    $textile = new Textile();
    $text = $textile->TextileThis($parser->mSwappedOutText);
    break;

Step Three

Download the Textile2 source from here& and copy the file classTextile.php to the same directory where the alternative parsers are.

Step Four

Actually, you’re done! You now have another alternative parser ‘textile2’ available.

Once you have installed this, the editor buttons are no longer useful… maybe I’ll integrate TheEditorHelper unless someone else gets it done first.