Table Edit in Mediawiki

Sunday, October 18, 2009

I just installed Ecoli Hub’s TableEdit into MediaWiki.

It went moderately smoothly, except the update_schema.php script failed to prefix the tables, which meant that MediaWiki couldn’t find them. It took me a little poking around to figure out what was happening, but I got an error that brtext_TableEdit_box couldn’t be found. Now an unfortunate prefix choice in that it looked to me a bit like br text… as opposed to brtExt, but once I figured that out I was on the way to a little editing with phpMyAdmin and everything worked.

TableEdit is a step in the right direction for interactive table editing, what I’d consider the biggest weakness of wiki’s at this point. It seems most of the information I’d put in a wiki would be more efficiently formatted as tables, and as a result I have lots of non-interactive spreadsheets; something that gets confusing on frequently updated, collaboratively edited text. WebDAV might be a solution for that, and maybe OpenOffice will get “open via sFTP” as an option soon, but until then EcoliHub’s solution is a step forward, though what I still really want is a viably speedy version of Dan Bricklin’s wikicalc.

Posted at 18:47:33 GMT-0700

Category : FreeBSDTechnology

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