[Building Sakai] Rwiki

[Charlie Macchia]

On 7/16/09 1:42 PM, "Knoop, Peter" <knoop at umich.edu> wrote:

> I took Charlie's and Adam's comments to be about adding wysiwyg editing
> capabilities to rwiki in general, not specifically about adding FCKeditor to
> rwiki.

Hi Peter et. Al.

That's about it - FCKEditor doesn't really do wiki's - but my limited
experience amounts to this: people are asking for "something like google
docs", and I show them the wiki - they're excited until they try to use it.
I had a small community of iPhone developers use it for a while, but even
the code geeks took a while to get up to speed on it.

I've learned that if you can provide a document system that doesn't require
people handing their data over to Google, nor maintaining a Lotus
Notes/Exchange system - even if it has only 1/4 the doc handling power, as
long as it's easy to use, for most collaborative groups, that'll do.  If
that system resides within a very powerful open source VRE, it's a no
brainer.

My opinion is this - the GUI editor doesn't have to keep up with all the
coolest features that are added to rWiki vis a vis special characters and
macros - but it does have to provide the basics; otherwise we're cutting off
too many people from a very powerful tool. ( by nature, it will have to deal
well with the codes it doesn't understand - here's where that ball of wax
comes in )

So, that's my take - I'm sure there must be some great open source wiki
editors out there that can provide a good place to start, no sense
re-inventing the wheel.

Yes, we should also look into what happened with the previous efforts.

Now, please tell me if I'm crazy ( politely ;)
Charlie