Are any desktop WYSIWYG editors for MediaWiki / wiki available?

Question

MediaWiki is very good, but for programming tasks editing it via the web is not very handy since WYSIWYG is very limited. Pressing 'edit' + 'publish' on any small change and waiting for page loading is kind of annoying. I have seen a lot of desktop wikis (personal wikis) that are free from such problems. The best example is WikidPad that has a usage pattern of 'focus, edit wiki in-place, minimize'.

Does a desktop application exists that can connect to MediaWiki and allows to view and edit it via a rich WYSIWYG editor? Any hints are welcomed.

Solution 1

Not really. For an explanation and a list of imperfect options, read this page.

However, you might not need a WYSIWYG editor in order to make many quick edits to a wiki. It is possible to download the wikitext of a page, edit it locally, and submit the changes. There are scripts (called bots) available which do this. One example is pywikipediabot's "editarticle.py" script. You might also want to take a look at AutoWikiBrowser.

Solution 2

It's not quite WYSIWYG, but wikEd adds a few more editor options in the form of a Greasemonkey script, so you can use it for any MediaWiki instance, even if you're not an admin:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/12529

Also, see this page for a list of WYSIWYG options, some of which you can install on your instance of MediaWiki if you have full control over it:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor

The TinyMCE patch might be what you're looking for,

Solution 3

We use the FCK Editor. It is not perfect (changing between that and the standard editor can lead to formating changes) but it does enable copy and pasting from Office documentation. This is particularly useful with tables, which MediaWiki makes such a drama out of.

Solution 4

There is this Emacs mode which I guess qualifies as a desktop app. But I don't think it is what you want.

Solution 5

http://gwennel.com/gwennel-web/

Currently at 0.1 version, very rough around the edges, has some promise.

Desktop app that runs on Windows, no idea about Wine compatibility however.

Loads remote web pages, at least tries to upload changes and authenticate. Doesn't seem to require any third party extensions to be installed on the mediawiki install.

I'm having a few issues getting it to work, but I don't know if it's me or the software.

View more solutions

Comments

[grigoryvp]

As i can see, all of this is a web-based software. What i'm looking for is a desktop app :(