[Web4lib] wikis in libraries

[John Fereira]

Linda_M.Schwartz at lvh.com wrote:
> The answer is wikis designed for the masses.  Check out www.seedwiki.com  for
> a WYSIWYG wiki that uses the familiar word processing icons for editing
> although those with HTML skills are free to use those as well.
>
>   
As I mentioned before, Confluence uses a WYSIWYG editor for it's wiki.  
The "familiar word processing icons" actually caused a bit of confusion 
for one our our users.  Because the familiar icons made the editor look 
somewhat like a MS Word editor, one user assumed she could cut-n-paste 
right out of word and that the editor would maintain the 
formatting/style that she had applied in her word document. 

I took a quick look at Seedwiki and viewing the source showed that it 
uses the FCKedit rich text editor.  I noticed that the rich text editing 
area has a full complement of icons available to the user to format 
text.  I've looked only briefly at FCKedit so I don't know how 
configurable it is.  One of the things I liked about TinyMCE (which 
confluence uses) was how customizable it is.  Rather than provide lots 
of different icons for formatting/style it can be configured such that a 
limited set of markup is available.  For example, I can exclude "Bold", 
"Italic", "Underline" icons, and instead hook in a css file to the 
dropdown styles list which provides "Highlight" or "Emphasis" css 
styles, or replace a dropdown font list with items such as "Arial", 
"Times Roman" with css styles such as "Heading", "Subsection", etc.

You'll probably find that most wikis or content managements system which 
provide a rich text editing interface will use either FCKedit, TinyMCE, 
or possibly HTMLArea.  When evaluating rich text editing capabilities 
it's worth looking at which one the wiki/cms is using and how 
configurable it is. 
> Linda
> Linda Matula Schwartz, MDE
> Library Information Specialist
> Lehigh Valley Hospital
>
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