Adding a gadget to VisualEditor - Wikitech-l

17 Sep 2019

Hello list,

I was sent here from the #mediawiki IRC channel, I hope this is indeed the correct list to
write to and ask you to please forgive me if it is not.

First, a bit about myself: I'm no real developer, just a tech-savvy guy trying to
build a wiki to document my employer's company inner workings. This last bit means
documenting any piece of information we handle and our business processes in doing so.

After testing a few wiki engines, I came to the conclusion that mediawiki with the cargo
extension was what I was looking for. I also built a small extension to allow inclusion
and edition of BPMN diagrams with the https://bpmn.io library. All in all, this is pretty
basic.

Then I came to the realization that if I wanted any lambda-user to be willing to
contribute to the wiki content, I needed the Visual Editor. Deploying it was easy enough,
and everything seems to be working fine at the moment.

I however feel I should make it possible to include a BPMN diagram from the VE toolbar.
Ideally, this will take the form of a "popup" that will include the bpmn.io
modeler to edit the diagram. However, in order to achieve this goal, I have a whole damn
lot to learn and to experiment with about VE.

So I thought I should start with something a little humbler: a button that would just
include some basic XML in the page (a special page already allows editing that part of the
page, so this would already be convenient, though far from perfect). Using the gadgets
example from the documentation on the mediawiki wiki, I'm able to insert content into
the page. But that content is escaped if it includes XML and I have no idea from the API
doc how to include something less basic than mere text (or than a given template, since
the example actually shows how to do that).

What I'm actually getting at is this: would someone with good knowledge of the API and
some good old patience be willing to "tutor" me by giving pointers where I need
them ?

My first technical question would be this: I understand that my gadget can register a
ve.ui.Command, that will in turn call a method on an ve.ui.Action object. I guess I should
stick to the ContentAction one. But I'm not sure what the "content"
parameter should contain if given an array. Is there, somewhere, some documentation I can
read on this?

Thanks a bunch for any help.

Regards,

--
Alain Perry