Etherpad Lite

Etherpad Lite is a software that allows real-time collaborative editing of a document. This page lists some information about the Wikimedia Foundation's use of that software.

Status
The Wikimedia Foundation has launched a test instance of Etherpad Lite on Labs, so we are working on that transition.

If you would like to help test that instance, go ahead and create pads, and invite friends. We use it for semi-official things, but everybody is warned in advance (as are you, now) that the Labs instance may crash, or lose data. That being said, both of those things seem very unlikely at this point, barring some kind of attack on the server.

How you can help
There are a few things that still need doing, but are currently stalled.

Re-package newer versions of Etherpad Lite
There are some security fixes and new features that should get re-packaged into the final version of our debian release. Get the latest "stable" version from the EPL website.

Puppetize Etherepad Lite
This could take some work, a lot of work, or no work. I'm not very familiar with Puppet.

Wishlist
Some more thoughts.

Plugin for syntax highlighting
This already exists (as ep_syntaxhighlighting in NPM), but we should think about bringing it up to date and maybe adding some features.

Plugin for multiple tabbed editor windows
This could be useful for teams who want to work on the same documents at once (especially in combination with the syntax highlighting thing, above).

Plugin for (somehow) running the files that are being edited
Maybe offer a script that can download all the pads passed in on the command line, then a quick button for summoning the list of pads that are open. We'd probably also need to come up with a way to add slashes (/) into pad URLs, because they're currently disallowed. I think I can write that patch pretty quickly.

Alternatively, we could include, in the multiple-tabbed-windows plugin, a way to tie documents on EPL to paths. Then the frontend could generate a quick wget command that will fetch all of the files at once.

Migration of old pads
In an ideal world, we'd merge etherpad.wikimedia.org into the new system (or at least the last revision of each pad), and keep URLs working. If not, some archival strategy is needed.

Indexing of pads
Public pads should be discoverable. Adding a plugin to tag pads, and e.g. add a catch-all #public tag, would be a start.