Wikka Developer Blog

I recently blogged at AcademicProductivity.com on the benefits of using an invisible wiki to power one’s personal homepage. If this sounds like a shameless plug for WikkaWiki, it is. The full tutorial can be found on this page. I also created a short screencast showcasing how a wiki makes it easy to perform three simple tasks. Soundtrack courtesy of Piero Umiliani (1968). Enjoy

At WikkaWiki we love wiki markup. Wiki markup is a simple and fast way to generate well structured XHTML output using a light, plain-text format that you can safely copy and paste. This is the reason why we all tend to prefer editor toolbars (or directly writing wiki markup) over feature-bloated and unaccessible WYSIWYG plugins that produce ill-structured XHTML.

Following this idea, Olivier–who recently joined the Wikka Developer Team–has done a tremendous work and rewritten the editor toolbar from scratch. The result is truly amazing and is called: “WikkaEdit”.

WikkaEdit is a new streamlined Wikka editor toolbar with more user-friendly features and a new and improved look-and-feel. It replaces the WikiEdit toolbar by Roman Ivanov, bundled with Wikka since the very first release and currently discontinued.

The basic version of WikkaEdit is included in the development branch of WikkaWiki 1.1.6.4 and features the following improvements:

• lighter and more performant code;
• improved cross-browser compatibility;
• self-resizing editor;
• additional buttons;
• improved search and replace functionality;
• indent/unindent using tab;
• new keyboard shortcuts;

But–guess what–this is just the beginning! If 1.1.6.4 introduces the basic functionality of WikkaEdit, 1.1.7 features an advanced version of the editor toolbar with a nifty inline helper for Wikka actions. The advanced version of WikkaEdit can be previewed on a demo server and is already available for testing in the nightly builds.

I’ll post separately a review of the advanced version of WikkaEdit. But first please join me in thanking Olivier for the great job he has done!

If you are new to the concept of a wiki and wish to preview some of the features of WikkaWiki, then these screencasts may be what you are looking for.
Nine short QuickTime videoclips introducing the basics of Wikka.

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