MWS Preview
The Problem:
- MediaWiki is a very popular and convenient engine for knowledge management systems 📚
- both global 🌍
- and local, intra-company ones 🏢
- even for a small project, it is often convenient to set up MediaWiki:
- the project can grow unexpectedly 📈
- uniform interface for working with large knowledge bases in MediaWiki
- easier to maintain link integrity 🔗
- for customer-readers, reading is more important than writing. 👀
- convenient to maintain «portals» 🧭
- The browser editing interface is simple, but heavily limited by the capabilities of a textarea or visual editor ✍️
- due to textarea limitations, the markup language is not as good as it could be ⚠️
- for example, you cannot use the
TAB key to briskly manage indents, like in MD ⌨️
- even with best Web Editors like CodeMirror/WikEd you have no professional IDE experience
- But professionals want to work with content effectively
- like with flat markup files 📄
- using a good editor 💻
- for speed ⚡
- for voluminous articles
- for mass operations — bulk editing, etc. 🧹
- for collaborative realtime editing 🤝
This is what this extension is designed for, allowing you to:
 preview even an unsaved .mw file in a preview pane, without publishing
- taking into account all templates, extensions, and other settings of your MediaWiki
 fix markup and typography issues with a single «make it good» button
publish and synchronize MediaWiki files using MWS
- we recommend the MWS command-line utility for polite synchronization (three-way merge, does not publish conflicts) in the spirit of simple Version Control Systems (like RCS, CVS).
Installation
Install
- this extension
- the wikitext extension
- the most up-to-date MediaWiki support
- wikiparser is optional
- optionally, we recommend the MWS utility for publishing
- but you can use your own tools
- or simply copy-paste the edited wiki content to MediaWiki and back
Usage
Open a file containing wikitext.
Three buttons will appear.
Preview MediaWiki markup directly in VS Code / code-server via remote MediaWiki
uses the API method (action=parse), allowing it to work with ancient MediaWiki versions that do not yet have Parsoid.
Searches for a local configuration in .mws/config.json, traversing up directories from the current file, looking for the api_url parameter.
api_url can be either the full path to api.php or the base website URL (in this case, the extension will try to append /w/api.php).
If not found, it uses the global mws.apiUrl setting.
Live preview updates with debouncing.
— fixes markup issues and, optionally, Russian typography with a single «make it good» button, integrating twenty years of experience and hundreds of heuristics from the MediaWiki4intranet project.
Publishing and synchronizing a local .mw file, if it was checked out via MWS.
- credentials for authorized publishing
- will be prompted for on the first commit
- format
username password [domain] (enter space-separated)
- can be reset using the
mws.setAuthString command
- stored only in session memory
- allows different wiki users to publish via a single code-server.
- secure
-
experimented with various keyrings, it's all a profanation if working on a shared code-server.
- also, during the first commit, it will ask for an edit summary for the changes, and will use it subsequently
- marks all wiki edits in the working session in a unified way
- can be reset using the
mws.setSyncSummary command
A normal paste works smartly, converting (as best it can) rich/html markup into wikitext.
- Headings, lists, bold, italics, etc.
- Tables are converted to HTML tables
- for flexible support of coloring/formatting (it's easier to keep styles)
- drops elements/attributes not supported by MediaWiki
- formatted in such a way that
- the structure is visible
- but the cell content starts at the beginning of the lines
- making it easier to develop later as wiki content
Development
There are tests (currently for the «fix everything» heuristics)
Configuration
mws.apiUrl: string, default is https://ru.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
- used if the local config
.mws/config.json is not found
mws.debounceMs: auto-update debounce in milliseconds
- todo: switch to microseconds or seconds, there's no point in doing it faster than a couple of seconds.
mws.background: Preview background color
- a temporary hack due to the incompleteness of fetched styles
- might result in unreadable text if pulling default styles from dark VSCode/code-server themes
mws.hideEditLinks: Hide [edit] links in headings.
- todo: probably needs to be hardcoded, no one ever needs them
mws.insecureTLS: Allow insecure TLS connections, for example
- for self-signed certificates in intranet wikis
- or for standard http connections.
mws.fixTypography: Fix typography as well during «Fix WikiText».mws.sync.command: publish command, configured by default to work with MWS
- supports substitutions
${file}, ${workspaceFolder}, ${summary} …
- easily adaptable to your publishing system
Discussion and News
License
MIT
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