Extension:VisualEditor

The VisualEditor project aims to create a reliable rich-text editor for MediaWiki. More information can be found on the project page; this page is just about the extension itself. The extension relies on the separate nodeJS-based Parsoid parser service to be up and running in order to edit pages. Stable release is planned for 2014.

Basic setup instructions
With the "basic setup" (without Parsoid) you can experiment with this extension on your own wiki. To do this add the following lines to your wiki's  after you have downloaded the extension:

Congratulations, you should now have VisualEditor up and running! To test it you need to create a new page, depending on your setup you might end up in the standard editor or wikieditor but when you press the "Create" tab you should end up in the Visual editor.

Without the Parsoid service you will not be able to edit existing pages or save pages!

Setup a Parsoid service
If you want to be able to edit existing pages and save pages with VisualEditor you need a Parsoid service.

To setup your own Parsoid service follow the Parsoid installation instructions first.

Linking with Parsoid
To get VisualEditor to talk to the parser, add the following code to your  to specify your Parsoid instance:

Additionally, if you want to use a Parsoid instance with a wiki that isn't running on localhost, you will need to edit the following line (the default is fine for most people's configurations):

Linking with Parsoid in private wikis
ONLY enable this on private wikis and ONLY IF you understand the SECURITY IMPLICATIONS of sending Cookie headers to Parsoid over HTTP!

Troubleshooting

 * parsoidserver-http-curl-error : Failed to connect to .... : Permission denied.
 * Can be caused by a cURL request on a Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux, like CentOS) to a non standard port like 8000 in the example configuration above, see http://www.akashif.co.uk/php/curl-error-7-failed-to-connect-to-permission-denied


 * parsoidserver-http-bad-status : 401
 * Caused by read or edit restrictions. If you've set up a private wiki and don't want to use cookie forwarding, you can


 * parsoidserver-http-not-found : 404 (or timeout)
 * Caused by wrong path to wikimedia api. Set correct url to api.php in localsettings.js parsoid config file.

explicitly remove restrictions for Parsoid by IP address.