Extension:VEForAll

The VEForAll ("VisualEditor For All") extension allows other extensions to incorporate the VisualEditor interface into textareas for user editing.

This extension does not directly impact the user interface. Rather, it defines a JavaScript function (called " ") that can be called by other extensions on their textareas. At the moment, three extensions - CommentStreams, Page Forms and FlexForm - can make use of VEForAll.

As might be expected, the VisualEditor extension must be installed for this extension to work.

Download
You can download the VEForAll code, in .zip format, here.

You can also download the code directly via Git from the MediaWiki source code repository. From a command line, you can call the following:

You can also view the code online here.

Installation
To install this extension, create a 'VEForAll' directory (either by extracting a compressed file or downloading via Git), and place this directory within the main MediaWiki 'extensions' directory. Then, in the file 'LocalSettings.php', add the following line:

Using VEForAll with other extensions
VEForAll can currently be used with the CommentStreams, Page Forms and FlexForm extensions:


 * For CommentStreams (version 4.5 or higher), you simply need to have VEForAll (and VisualEditor) installed, and then textareas for entering comments will automatically get the VisualEditor interface.
 * For Page Forms (version 4.7 or higher), in the form definition, add  to the tag for any textarea input (including the "free text" input), and the VisualEditor interface should show up when viewing that form.
 * For FlexForm, use editor="ve" when defining a textarea. E.g. . You can have as many VE editors on a page as needed and you can even add a menu/button to the VE Editor that will open another VE Editor.

Configuration
By default, the toolbar is display at the bottom of the textarea. In Page Forms, you can instead display it at the top by adding  to the textarea's tag in the form definition.

You can use the "VEForAllToolbarConfigNormal" hook to customize the display of the VisualEditor toolbar. For example, to add "math" and "media" buttons, add the following to LocalSettings.php:

Known issues
In some skins, the dropdowns may look rather compressed. You can apply a small CSS tweak to fix this:

Authors and credits
VEForAll is heavily based on the (now-obsolete) VEForPageForm extension by Pierre Boutet and Clément Flipo. Some work to make the code more generic was done by Ike Hecht, Yaron Koren and Cindy Cicalese. Others who contributed to the code include Anysite and Mark Hershberger. VEForAll also includes code from the StructuredDiscussions extension.

Version history

 * 0.1 - May 3, 2018 - Initial version
 * 0.2 - February 7, 2020 - Made toolbar configurable; removed dependency on the Math extension; fixed submitting values for "focused" textareas; set VE direction (RTL/LTR) correctly; added "veForAll.targetCreated" hook; many other fixes
 * 0.3 - May 5, 2021 - Improved support for MW 1.35+; removed support for MW < 1.29; added handling for Page Forms "max height" parameter; added escaping of pipes in table wikitext within Page Forms template fields; bug fixes
 * 0.4 - November 3, 2021 - Improved support for MW 1.34+; removed support for MW < 1.32; fixes for pipe escaping