Contributing a new WikiText Module for 4.5.x

(To Drupal Developers and users who wish to have WikiText support:)

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I've been using Drupal since 4.2.x, and have been relatively happy with the simple Wiki module derived from phpwiki that someone contributed to Drupal. Granted, it's really only an input filter, without support for what one expects to find in a Wiki (such as diffs, etc.), and offers a fairly limited set of markups (compared with, say, WikiMedia). However, in the context of the rest of Drupal, it serves most needs. For my own usage, I added other markup supports like simple HTML table.

Users of this module have probably known about the odd integration of the wiki module with Drupal's "filter architecture." That is, WikiText filtering was supported only for certain node types. The good news is that Drupal release 4.5.0 apparently offers a "re-architected" input formatting scheme with much cleaner support for filters.

Not having seen a Wiki module made available for 4.5.0, I decided to port the Wiki module from 4.3.2 (my latest Drupal installation) into the 4.5.x input filter architecture. I'm not completely sure that I've done the task correctly, but I'm confident that it follows the examples of the legacy.module and filter.module. I have gotten the WikiText filter to work in 4.5.1. As would be expected, the WikiText filtering works for all node content types from book to page to story to comment. Basically, wherever you can select an Input format, there Wiki support will be also.

I did notice another user posting a patch on Nov 7, 2004 suggesting the upgrade of the Wiki module to 4.5.0 (http://drupal.org/node/12416). I didn't really take time to examine that patch to differentiate it from my patch, although my sense from briefly inspecting it is that it didn't use the 4.5.x filter hooking mechanism.

My "patch" is really a new module, where I've included the markups I've added over the year while using the previous Wiki module. This new wikitext module doesn't interact well yet with the HTML Filter, but I'll let someone else worry about that for now.

To use this new wikitext module:

1. Plop it into the modules dir of your 4.5.1 drupal installation
2. Enable the wikitext module via administer/modules
3. Go to administer/input formats and take one of two routes:
- Route #1: If you want all your existing nodes that have been using the _default_ Filtered HTML input format to now support WikiText, then configure that input format and check the WikiText filter to enable it (preferably disable the other filters, or rearrange them to eliminate conflicts).
- Route #2: Alternatively, add a new input format (call it anything you want, like "WikiText"), and configure it to enable WikiText.
4. If you want the WikiText filter to support HTML tags, go over to "configure filters" and choose "Enable HTML." What this does is to allow you, on any line, to use HTML tags simply by beginning the line with |>
5. To see the WikiText formatting guidelines, click on the "more info about formatting options" link on any edit page, or go under http://yoursite/filter/tips

Hope you find this useful!

~mosquito