Extension talk:Balloons

Documentation
This extension works quite nicely sometimes, but not always in accordance with the documentation, at least not on my wiki.


 * 1) The style parameter controls the text in the browser panel, not in the balloon as the documentation suggests.
 * 2) Some but not all CSS styles seem to work.
 * 3) Wiki tags (some at least) will work if the title=MyElement +   system is used. This allows placing regular wiki image tags in the balloon, and even DPL lists.
 * 4) The width parameter doesn't seem to work at all.

Perhaps I haven't understood the documentation, or there is something wrong with my installation. I've tested the balloon extension on Firefox and Google Chrome.

Thanks for this useful extension.

--C4duser 04:41, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

C4duser:


 * 1) This is the intended behavior.  I made the documentation more specific so this is clear
 * 2) examples?
 * 3) Good to know!
 * 4) This was a bug -- it is fixed in version 0.3

Mckays 14:00, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

No balloons here
No balloons here

Input as per-instructions but nothing

--24.249.248.8 16:58, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

-- I'm sorry it did not work for you and I'd like to help but you need to provide some details like error messages, etc. Contact information would also be helpful. Almost all failure reports turn out to be the result of typos and not following the documention, so code samples and implementation details are helpful in diagnosing the problem. Mckays 23:34, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

tarball corrupted
package tar corrupted.

resolved Mckays 00:29, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

The package was not corrupt but somehow affected by passage through CVS. It is OK now, I think. A .zip archive is also available. You can download the package here:

WBalloons.tar.gz

WBalloons.zip

Balloons in Demo Show Error
Hi, in your demo an error shows up during the second iteration of mousing over the hyperlinked text and images. The error message displays line invalid argument on line 342 character 16. Has this been fixed?

Thanks.

This has been fixed Mckays 00:27, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

as side-effect mouse-selection problems
Ballons work nicely. However, I get problems when I want to select pieces of text. Selecting text by left-mouse-click, keeping button pressed and then moving mouse does not always work anymore. Sometime it does, sometimes it does'nt. This irrespective whether the wiki-page is edited or not. I am using IE7 and mediawiki-1.12.1. When I disable balloons in LocalSettings.php selection works fine again. --194.171.252.100 12:44, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

We have the same promblem.Wait for your resolution Thank you for any help -- Tryflcwiki 09:15, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

I made one change, which seems to work fine in my local installation. The change is in "balloon.js", line 603 " if (!self) return true;" (I replace "false" by "true"). Note that I am not the editor of this extension. I left a note in as well. Let me know if it works for you as well. walfried.veldman@gmail.com --Walfried.veldman 11:14, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

great!it works well in mine. it's very useful for me.thank u! by the way, if this solution has other side-effects,please let me know. thanks. Tryflcwiki 00:53, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks to all. I fixed this a while back in the non-wiki version but only just added it here. Please advise (mckays@cshl.edu) if your IE text selection gives any problems. Mckays 11:58, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

HTML within a balloon

 * I tried out your balloons extension for MediaWiki and found it to be a very useful tool....


 * There is a way to display HTML within the tag that I had discovered basically because of the same problem sending information to Wiki templates and back again. This was a problem caused by the wiki conversions that occur.

<balloon title="&amp;lt;table border=2&amp;gt; &amp;lt;th colspan&amp;&#35;61;3 bgcolor&amp;&#35;61;lightblue&amp;gt;THIS IS A TABLE&amp;lt;/th&amp;gt; &amp;lt;tr&amp;gt;&amp;lt;td&amp;gt;ONE!&amp;lt;/td&amp;gt;&amp;lt;td&amp;gt;TWO!&amp;lt;/td&amp;gt;&amp;lt;td&amp;gt;THREE!&amp;lt;/td&amp;gt; &amp;lt;/tr&amp;gt; &amp;lt;tr&amp;gt;&amp;lt;td&amp;gt;FOUR!&amp;lt;/td&amp;gt;&amp;lt;td&amp;gt;FIVE!&amp;lt;/td&amp;gt;&amp;lt;td&amp;gt;SIX!&amp;lt;/td&amp;gt; &amp;lt;/tr&amp;gt; &amp;lt;/table&amp;gt;" style="color:red;font-size:10pt">A TABLE! A TABLE!
 * Utilizing the html character coding for "< &amp;lt;, > &amp;gt; etc."; as an example, was used to create a table within the tag:
 * Code on Wiki page looks like this:
 * This will be converted successfully for the balloon tag when page is rendered:
 * Its a bit messy looking; however, this does work in IE7, FF, and Google Chrome....
 * not all html is allowed in a Wiki though that can be easily changed if need be.

Wjk 21:46, 3 May 2009 (UTC) Reply: Thanks for the feedback. You are quite correct that formatted HTML can be inserted as an attribute to the &lt;balloon&gt; element using HTML escape codes. However, it does not scale well and gets really nasty for complex content. I would recommend the load: syntax, which allows you to use regular HTML and be as fancy as you like, within the limits imposed by MediaWiki. Also see the documentation for balloon.js Mckays 11:51, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Version number
The version number is still "0.1" in your "0.3" code. The Special:Version will show 0.1 only.

Fixed. Thanks. Mckays 11:49, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Still supported?
I have some fairly serious issues getting this to work, although I may be exceeding the scope of the extension. Is anyone still supporting this? If so I'll give a lot of details, if not I'll save the keystrokes :) -- 85.214.55.250 00:49, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes. still supported. Email is the best method for feedback, I do not monitor this page in a regular basis. mckays@cshl.edu Mckays 11:48, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Use on Mediawiki.org
How do I get this to work on a wiki hosted on mediawiki.org itself? 211.30.244.97 23:53, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

Compatibility with Semantic Forms
I use Semantic Forms and found that there is a compatibility issue. Basically, forms to edit the page are constructed without including the necessary Balloon extension javascript files. To resolve this issue, I added the following text to line 150 of \extensions\SemanticForms\includes\SF_Utils.inc as follows:

$wgOut->addScript(' ' . "\n"); $wgOut->addScript(' ' . "\n"); $wgOut->addScript(' ' . "\n"); $wgOut->addScript('' . "\n" . 'var balloon = new Balloon;' . "\n" . 'BalloonConfig(balloon);' . "\n" . 'balloon.images  = "' . $wgScriptPath . '/extensions/balloons/images";' . "\n"  . ' ' . "\n");

Kind of a nuclear approach, but it worked for me. Thanks for the great extension. Cheers, Thorncrag 01:01, 29 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Kudos to Thorncrag for this tip! Hade the same problem with semantic forms. Baloons is an great way to make concise semantic forms, because you can add lenghty form guidelines inside balloons.