native wiki

[dvsDave]

The biggest blank spot in both VB and IPB is their lack of a native wiki product.

I want a wiki product with multiple namespaces and autolinking of terms from the the forums to the wiki entry. I also want to be able to see a list of terms in the wiki displayed like the memberlist on vb. (characters listed in a row across the top)

You provide that and an import from vbulletin and I'll move in a heartbeat.

 

[Digital Doctor]

Wordpress has a new Wiki.
Looks pretty good.
I'm going to try it later.

Article: http://wpmu.org/create-your-own-wiki-with-the-wordpress-wiki-plugin-now-available-for-free/
Project Page: http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/wordpress-wiki

 

[Digital Doctor]

This thread should focus on: wikis in general.

Note: I've started a

Vaultwiki for Xenforo thread here.


Nobody should forget there is a Mediawiki Bridge for Xenforo by SchmitzIT !

 

[Panupat]

Anyone have experience with XenCarta comparing to others? How is it in terms of

- ease of use? I want my whole community to contribute in the wiki with ease and MediaWiki is such a scary software for them. Can you use bbcode with XenCarta?

- features? Are there any important features missing from XenCarta that are available from other wiki?

 

[Digital Doctor]

XenCarta v. others

- ease of use?

I want my whole community to contribute in the wiki with ease and MediaWiki is such a scary software for them.

Mediawiki is scary for everyone but staff members on your site and the nerds of the nerds that edit wikipedia.

Can you use bbcode with XenCarta?

YES !!! That is a major plus of XenCarta.
Other pluses are the robust caching of templates and the cool templates themselves.
This wiki is entirely template driven: Jaxel's wiki: http://8wayrun.com/wiki/index/
You can also embed a wiki item into a forum post. This can be a very powerful thing.
Wiki items have Likes.

- features? Are there any important features missing from XenCarta that are available from other wiki?

Yes there are missing features.
Wiki entries do not have authors, and do not have a "Permission System" - the ability to edit wiki items is either all or none.
One way to really get people interested in the wiki is to give them ownership of wiki items. (ie. I keep the bbcode section of the xenforo wiki up to date, and you keep up the section dealing with all the smiley packs, Joe Blow can keep up the list of Addons related to Wordpress). Ownership is a part of responsibility.
XenCarta, IMO, is designed for mostly admins and few choice members to edit the wiki. That works for Jaxel, but then again his wiki isn't a heavily edited wiki.
There isn't a back end dealing with wiki edit changes (ie. Wiki edits aren't able to show up as "edited" in a Wiki admin's area).
And I don't think you add wiki items from the front end (Not sure, must verify).
Currently there is no integration into the "What's New" aspects of the Forums.

Keep in mind, you might be less picky than I am about wikis
Let us know what is your ussage needs and what you might wish for in a Wiki for Xenforo.

 

[Jaxel]

And I don't think you add wiki items from the front end (Not sure, must verify).
Currently there is no integration into the "What's New" aspects of the Forums.

Wiki items are added from the front end... there is no back end.

"What's New" is for new threads. You are thinking about the "Recent Activity" page, and yes, the wiki is integrated into it.

 

[Digital Doctor]

Wiki items are added from the front end... there is no back end.

Good to know. Thanks.

"What's New" is for new threads.

One way to make the wiki a part of the community, not off to the side, is to have wiki items show up in the What's New.

You are thinking about the "Recent Activity" page, and yes, the wiki is integrated into it.

Nice !
I dont use the Recent Activity much, at least at Xenforo.com.

Q: XenCarta uses Xenforo's default TinyMCE editor ?

 

[Jaxel]

Q: XenCarta uses Xenforo's default TinyMCE editor ?

Yes it does... It even has an option to disable WYSIWYG.

 

[ragtek]

Good to know. Thanks.

One way to make the wiki a part of the community, not off to the side, is to have wiki items show up in the What's New.

that's IMHO a xenforo BUG. (they should include ALL CONTENT TYPES, or rename what's new to "new posts"

 

[Digital Doctor]

that's IMHO a xenforo BUG. (they should include ALL CONTENT TYPES, or rename what's new to "new posts"

Kier's answer to this is he made forum software.

In your estimation, would it require a great deal of changes to xenforo to enable:
(1) gallery images
(2) wiki entries
(3) articles with comments
(4) Content XYZ.

to all show up in What's New ?

 

[Digital Doctor]

Yes it does... It even has an option to disable WYSIWYG.

If I had wiki-like editing access to the first of XenCarta I'd add this good information

 

[Digital Doctor]

Note to Self: what are the implications of this in a native wiki. http://xenforo.com/community/threads/html-5-microdata-in-breadcrumb.12347/

Kier said:

XenForo makes use of HTML 5 Microdata in its markup in order to identify the breadcrumb and other page elements to search engines etc.

Google's use of HTML 5 Microdata is changing rapidly as it recognises more of the syntax, and as a result it can interpret pages differently. It would appear that a change (at Google) late last week resulted in Google being unable to parse the microdata on XenForo pages, because we repeat some of the breadcrumb microdata in the bottom breadcrumb, after its primary inclusion in the top breadcrumb.

Removing all the microdata from the bottom breadcrumb has resolved the issue, and as you can see, you can now +1 pages on XenForo.com to your heart's content without errors.

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/fixed-google-google-1-button-issues.17803/page-5#post-232508

 

[Jaxel]

Note to Self: what are the implications of this in a native wiki. http://xenforo.com/community/threads/html-5-microdata-in-breadcrumb.12347/

None.

 

[tambling]

Hi Everyone,
We use MediaWiki to create and deliver content for my online Music Technology Classes:
https://www.brucetambling.com/wiki/Main_Page
I use Medi Wiki as a one way publishing system - Students do not have editing rights. We used phpBB bridged from MW a couple years ago, but there were always login issues for students. So we created a 100% native forum in MediaWiki which has been great, although it is not scalable. We are hoping we can leverage XenForo's rich features into our MediaWiki online class websites.

Digital Doctor asked me to post some screen shots of our MediaWiki forums.

We have a 'General Questions and Discussion Forum' and Assignment Forums. The Assignment Forums are cool because we can grade each post and the scores automatically show up in the student's Gradebook. This Forum is seamlessly integrated into MediaWiki with all of our custom extensions.

The XenForo-to-MediaWiki Extension bridge looks encouraging. Hopefully we can get things to bridge FROM MediaWiki to XenForo as well. If we could get all the XenForo goodness total rocking in MediaWiki, that would be pretty freaking cool. We are installing XenForo tonight!

BTW, as an author and instructor, I LOVE MediaWiki, and love MW syntax. I have over 20,000 pages of articles (rapidly growing) and use transclusion templates to organize excerpts into different class lesson modules. (a catalog of 14 classes with 12 Modules each of curriculum including videos). Have tried (and hired expert developers) to deploy similar features in Joomla, Drupal, WordPress or Moodle, and MediaWiki ate them all for breakfast! Plus, I love Hawaii and saying "WikiWiki" just makes me smile.

Once we reskin the Wiki, and get XF in the house, the system will be a very engaging educational CMS. www.MediaWikiCMS.com on it's way

 

[Digital Doctor]

Cool wiki tambling.
The interactive nature of Xenforo will help engage the students in participating online.
One interesting idea might be to get a "Xenforo Like" that works with Mediawiki articles, but shows up in the Xenforo Alerts

So .... you plan on bridging xF and MW and are going to release the product as an engaging educations CMS @ www.MediaWikiCMS.com ?

 

[tambling]

Since our server was still running php 5.1x, (we know it's old, but if it ain't broken…) we needed to 'upgrade' in order to install XenForo. Unfortunately, the password protected area of our MediaWiki site started spewing errors when we upgraded to php 5.3x, so we had to revert to 5.1. (if the site goes down, students freak out Evidently php 5.3 had some bugs, but most reports say these were fixed years ago. Guess our MedaiWiki ecosystem is "sensitive." We will try compiling php 5.2 and see how that goes.

I would love to see transparent bug free bridging from MW to XF, because XenForo is very seductive. But this php generated fire drill reminds me why I have preferred keeping everything native in MediWiki. MW-to-XF Bridge Extension could end up being wishful thinking (and playing with fire)

MediaWikiCMS.com is just a domain I picked up on a whim. As an instructor, I love the many custom extensions we have created for delivering and supporting online classes. Not sure if it could ever be a commercial product, because everything is so hacked. BUT, maybe someday we might find some other lunatics might want to participate.

Adding XenForo sure would pimp things up. Lets see if the Wiki Gods smile upon us, or send us back with our tail between our legs to native MediaWiki extensions. Hopefully we can pull this off.

 

[tambling]

Not to sidetrack this thread, but we are now whole heartedly engaged to create integration FROM MediaWiki into XenForo. Initial experience with XF has been fantastic, and we are certain it will be worth the effort to get it working with our MW website. The only bottleneck now is LEARNING how XenForo works. If there are any XF expert coders interesting in working on this project, please contact me!
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/need-media-wiki-to-xenforo-bridge.18017/

 

[Digital Doctor]

I was reading about Wordpress wiki plugins.
There is a simple wiki called eSimple wiki.
Here is a demo ... I did like the "AJAX" feel to the + Content menu.
http://quirm.net/wiki/esimple-wiki/ (click show/hide to toggle).

Notice: the wiki text that moves when the text box expands (nice !).

 

[Jaxel]

I was reading about Wordpress wiki plugins.
There is a simple wiki called eSimple wiki.
Here is a demo ... I did like the "AJAX" feel to the + Content menu.
http://quirm.net/wiki/esimple-wiki/ (click show/hide to toggle).

Notice: the wiki text that moves when the text box expands (nice !).

Thats not really ajax... thats just simple javascript...

Here... 2 minutes...
http://8wayrun.com/wiki/amy/

 

[Digital Doctor]

Thats not really ajax... thats just simple javascript...

Works great !
Nice Job.

 

[Morgain]

I am trying out Xencarta wiki and it's been very straightforward.

Easy to install.
Integrates well with XF in general.
Frontend edits.
Can lock pages.
No weird coding - BBCode to post, or HTML option.
But admin can use PHP.
Image uploading or URL links.
Templates you can create for pages. Samples provided.
Has powerful hierarchy of nodes.
Automatic page tree inline TOC.
Automatic full contents page.
Glossary style word links on titles.

TEMPLATE EDITS I've found doing template tweaks easy. For example I have a nice pic by the wiki Page Titles.

WHAT'S NEW I understand the problem with including the wiki items in What's New is on the XF side not the Xencarta side. XF does not include anything except forum material in What's new.

PERMISSIONS You have to either have page creation /edits by admin only OR a highly trusted associate/ team; as permissions are simply a global Yes/No on creation and editing.

NOT INTEGRATED IN NODE TREE. The only way to get wiki pages into the node tree is to use a forum redirect for each page. This is slow and clunky.

DUPLICATE CATEGORIES On most systems of categories you get items that do not fit in only one category. There's no provision for duplication of pages here.


On my (test) site the wiki is called "Library."