“MediaWiki”:http://www.mediawiki.org/ 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”:http://en.wikipedia.org
Naturally, I want to use MediaWiki for my own documentation sites. However, I use “Textile – a lightweight, humane web text generator”:http://thresholdstate.com/articles/4312/the-textile-reference-manual 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.
h3. Step One
Install the MediaWiki “AlternativeSyntaxParser extension”:http://jimbojw.com/wiki/index.php?title=AlternateSyntaxParser_Extension. Test it and if it works for you you’re done!
h3. 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; |
h3. Step Three
Download the Textile2 source from “here”:http://textile.thresholdstate.com/file_download/2/textile-2.0.0.tar.gz& and copy the file @classTextile.php@ to the same directory where the alternative parsers are.
h3. 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”:http://slateinfo.blogs.wvu.edu/plugins/textile_editor_helper/demo unless someone else gets it done first.
I *had* to add the hack to get MW 1.11 to render Textile–otherwise it was all 500 error.
– EL
Thanks for the comment Jim…
As far as I could tell, the calling methods for Textile and Textile2 seemed to be different, hence the “hack”
I’ll see if I can work out how to use the hook. If I do work it out I’ll post the result.
Hi Nigel,
Thanks for trying out my AlternateSyntaxParser – glad you like it!
Two quick notes:
1) Since the Textile class provided by Textile2 is the same as for original Textile, there’s no need to hack the extension code in any way. All you have to do is rename ‘classTextile.php’ to just ‘Textile.php’ – and that *should* be it.
2) In the event that it was going to be more complicated, the preferred way to add a new language is to create a new MediaWiki extension that hooks into the ‘AlternateSyntaxParser’ hook which I created expressly for this purpose. (Admittedly though, that particular feature is not documented).
Thanks again, and I’ll be happy to answer any questions.