I've become familiar with MediaWiki for various projects and now I much prefer its markup over using a word-processor/html/latex/restructured-text etc.
The thing is that some of the servers I edit on are quite slow, or I may not even want the document to end up online.
So my question is: Short of setting up my own webserver and running a MediaWiki instance, what's a way to edit MediaWiki markup and view locally?
Is there a tool or application which does this?
The formatting does not have to be a 100% match but I would want to be able to copy and paste between this and online MediaWiki docs with minimal editing.
Try using Markitup: make a local .html page to preview your edits in real time.
If you only need to edit the occasional page, you could try LibreOffice, with the libreoffice-wiki-publisher plugin: you can just paste the entire article into a new document, save it locally, edit it and then use the "Send to... wiki" menu to save the wikitext on the remote page.
Offline editing of MediaWiki is definitely a problem to solve; the best place where to discuss it is probably the offline-l mailing list, as Kiwix needs a solution too.
To give an answer to my own question, SoloWiki is an application which fits the bill:
http://solowiki.sourceforge.net
Though I used it a few times, it's not updated since 0.3 in 2010 and the output is limited to headings, bullets, numbering (from what I can tell).
Just including this answer here for completeness, I don't think it's an especially good option.
Related
I have a question regarding the client-side possibilities of a html webpage. I am currently working on my masters-thesis in aerospace engineering and plan to develop a design-catalog for inspiration. I chose html for this purpose, because I have a basic understanding, want to learn more and love the possibility of changing the style (e.g. width, height, padding, …) of all elements with a single command.
Unfortunately, there is no way of installing a local server or any other kind of software on the university computers. Besides, there is no way I get my colleagues (supervisor, Professor) to run additional software just to look at my catalog. Publishing the webpage on the intranet or internet is totally out of the question. The only possibility I have is using a browser (Firefox) and an Editor.
I thought about two different approaches:
Consider having a (Windows) folder containing images. Is it in any way possible to load all images of this specific folder into a webpage without using a server-side or installing any kind of software?
This would be even better: Is it in any way possible to make a website load data from a database into its own html code? I would like to be able to load only specific elements, e.g. all Designs with 2 Degrees of Freedom, or only load all images.
Any kind of database! I don't care if it is mySQL, MariaDB, Excel or even a CSV file or something completely different.
Security of the code is not an issue. The data is sensitive, but I have full control over the database and code. It is a no point planned to publish the webpage or host it somewhere.
I would appreciate any kind of comment whether this is in any way possible, or whether I definitely need a server (e.g. xampp) to realize my approaches. If there is no possibility I would need to implement every image by hand or scratch the idea of the design catalogue.
Thank you in advance!
Best regards, REn0
So I do not quite know if THIS website is the actual place to ask this question so please forgive me if it does not cooperate with question asking standards.
I am currently making a website with HTML and I am using Brackets as my editor. Now once I purchase a domain and I post my website and it is finally on the open web ready for commercial use, what if I need to change some information or add some pages?
Will I have to just open up the code using Brackets, edit it, and somehow replace it in the place where I put it in the first place? Or is there some sort of program that I can use that can update this?
I am just asking for suggestions. Thank you.
This is a very broad question and will likely be removed, however I'll point you in the right direction.
The exact steps to update your website will depend on your web host and the server you have set up, but in general you want an FTP/SFTP client that will connect to your server and let you upload files (I recommend Filezilla). All you do is connect to the IP address of your website and log in, then upload the new versions of the files to your website. It may take a few minutes to propagate and you may have to refresh the page, however that's all there is to it. For further help, just Google a tutorial on Filezilla.
I have an app with a support form that a customer can use to submit new issues. One of the things that's been requested is to search their public wiki and automatically create suggestions based upon it (very similar to what SO does). Since the page in question is outside of MediaWiki itself, I'm unsure about how to move forward.
My question is twofold:
Is there an out of the box extension to do this sort of thing?
If not, how would you recommend I go about doing it? I've never written a MediaWiki extension, but for the experienced among you, what approach would you take?
I don't know if something like that already exists. But if I had to do it from scratch, I would definitely go on using the mediawiki API. Example here:
Show a list of 10 pages that contain the word MYSEARCHTEXTGOESHERE
http://mywiki.org/wiki/api.php?action=query&list=search&srsearch=MYSEARCHTEXTGOESHERE&srprop=timestamp
It wouldn't be an extension in the wiki, but rather a GET call to the wiki server from your app.
here's my website:
www.newportclassic.com
do you know of any free, easy to use, content management systems, that will allow me to simply edit the text on my site without having to download the file, open the file, edit the code, save the file, upload the file ???????
I know of a few CMS's that have done well, here are two of them.
Wordpress - free - http://wordpress.org/ - 3.0 is coming soon
Perch - paid - http://grabaperch.com/ - very light and easy
Wikipedia has a very good list of content management systems broken down by language and cost (open source/proprietary) and DBMS. Most of the ones I've used/evaluated in the past have been .NET based, such as DotNetNuke. Pretty much any CMS will give you the ability to edit your HTML without changing any files on your web server. If you're going for simplicity, the Wikipedia list has several that use a flat file instead of a database, so I would start there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems#File_.2F_Flat_file
As an alternative to installing a CMS on your server, you might be interested in a service like CushyCMS. It allows you to specify what parts of your page are editable by setting an appropriate class in each editable div tag. Then to edit the contents of those div blocks, you log in to the CushyCMS site and make your changes right there. CushyCMS connects via FTP to the server for you and updates the HTML page.
You can use emacs -- it has a mode (tramp) where you can open, edit and save remote files as if they were on your local machine. This makes it really easy to edit files on a webserver.
haven't used it myself but i've heard Surreal CMS is quite good and easy to setup. Here's a tutorial to get you started.
In terms of user friendliness zimplit is hard to beat.
Try their demo.
You can literally edit your website with a wysiwyg interface inside your browser.
Refinery HQ is probably the easiest way to create, edit and update your website. You can upload images and files as you describe in your question.
You can also connect it to your own domain (it's a hosted service). So you'd be able to hook the site you create up to newportclassic.com
This question is for web developers and architects.
How do you think is it a good or bad idea to have a website where you're able to edit all the templates (HTML, CSS, JS, images..) right from the admin panel?
In this case if you update website often, you don't need to search for a local version of your website on you development machine, search for a specific page, make modifications, commit it to source control server, make deployment.. Instead, all you need is just right click on the page or any element on this page, click Edit, update a piece of HTML and click SAVE - 30 seconds maximum - all from your browser ;)
You still can have version control system with this approach and rollback any template which was modified by mistake by 2 mouse clicks on a website.
I personally like this approach and need to know your opinion. So what do you think?
Note, we are talking about big websites which have to be updated often, multilingual ones etc.
Realworld web-applications which use this approach:
Wordpress
vBulletin
Personally, I think it would depend on the complexity of the website.
What you're talking about here is directly editing the structure (and potentially behaviour) of a live website. Sure, it may take longer to make the changes on your development server before rolling them out but if there's any chance of breaking either the appearance or functionality of the site then I'd think definitely think twice.
You shouldn't be allowed to modify the entire layout of your site through the site itself in my opinion. The reasons being the lack of version control and the inability to preview what you are doing, which translate into the inability to come back to an older version. Plus if you modify it locally, you are allowed to make errors that break everything, a luxury you can't always afford if you're doing it directly through the website.
Being able to add/remove content through the website is great though, it would be very painful to update a blog by modifying your HTML each time!
I once created a site that did exactly that. (Well, without any option for source control - had to learn that one the hard way...) Looking back at what I did there, a few things come to mind:
It was a traditional website with information about my sports club, that only changed occasionally, not a web app in the modern sense.
I wanted to be able to apply fixes even though I had no access to my dev machine (because it was a private project, I was at work, and ftp connections were not allowed by the comapny proxy).
For those specific reasons, the approach was a good solution. Today I would use one of the many good frameworks for this purpose (Joomla, Drupal etc) instead of coding it myself.
On important item: I was able to edit the pages that were used to generate the main site, but not the generation program or my admin pages. For those, I had to use my dev machine and upload file changes by ftp.
I think it is a good approach, if done correctly (my implementation certainly wasn't)
Editing HTML/CSS/JS files through your web browser can make things easier, as long as the editing implementation is neat, organized, idiot-proof, and keeps track of revisions.
A major issue to consider is security. The inability to modify actual files from the content management system in most software packages is a security precaution.
Learn to use a version control system effectively and efficiently. Tools like git or bzr can take care of a lot of the tedious stuff automatically, like package building, uploading, etc.
I hate it. Web development, much like the web servers themselves, shouldn't be "comfortable". Web development should be a mother gentle caressing scary experience. It should sound, look, even taste dangerous.
Neophyte web developers should be put through their paces learning the subtler aspects of their chosen text editor before they are even allowed to open a web browser; and not be allowed near a graphical web browser before 6 months of working only using lynx for debugging.
Laziness is our bane. No more, I say.
Edit: This is, perhaps, a bit tangential to the issue at hand. It should also be mentioned that visual identity that is too simple to change will change too often, leading to confused and frustrated users.