Improving the Edit Template instead of an Wysiwyg Editor

Coming to the Twiki page by searching for intranet solution, i thought the technology is quite useful. However reviewing and presenting to others, i recognised two major topics.

People has some doubts it works because do not have any knowledge about Wiki technology at all. Explaining it in depth they find it is probaly a good solution.

Solved this, there is still an open issue which is the missing Wysiwig-Editor because not only tech-minded people should using it.

I have seen discussion about an Wysiwyg editor and do not expect such a solution short term, i'm also not a programmer but the feature mentioned below might be easier to implement and give some improvement.

I have reviewed the TikiWiki demo at http://tikiwiki.sourceforge.net . Using their edit edit template you have a taskbar with a lot of characters, by moving the mouse over e.g. the "b" you get the explanation "bold". Clicking the "b" it writes

__text__

in to the editbox at your last edit location. Replace the "text" with your sentence and it will be bold in the page later on. (I'm personally would prefer in the taskbar it is named bold instead of a b only)

They have a sandbox too for testing.

-- TWikiGuest - 14 Jan 2003

There is something similar available on twiki for IE users, the JavascriptBasedEditor, which uses a toolbar paradigm instead of just boxed links. It is a little smarter than the Tiki implementation in that the user can select text, click [bold], and the selected text changes to *this is a bold phrase* (Tiki replaces the selected text with the bold command).

-- MattWilkie - 14 Jan 2003