WikiCreole markup

[chuckssmith@…]

Hi, I just installed Trac and my development team would like to use the WikiCreole (www.wikicreole.org) markup in our project wiki. Are there any plans to make a parser for Creole? If not, would you please be able to develop it? Full specs can be found at ​http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/Creole0.3 Thank you!

—Chuck Smith

[Emmanuel Blot]

There is no plan to change the Wiki syntax.

You may want to write a plugin to support an alternative syntax (see ​th:wiki:WikiStart#Request-a-Hack)

[Matthew Good]

The Creole syntax seems pretty similar to what Trac already supports. The ​th:WikiGoodiesPlugin adds a bold and italics syntax similar to the one used in Creole, so you could use that as a basis for a plugin adding Creole-style bold and italics.

[Christian Boos]

Yes, but that plugin only adds *bold* and /italic/ for single words. That could be extended to multiple words, but not across lines, as that spec says.

I've just gone through WikiCreole again, and I definitely think there are some good things that we can lift up from there:

• use "|" as another separator in labeled links (​links)
• … hm, well, that's about it ;)

For supporting **bold text** and //italic text//, the current workaround is simply to go and patch the Formatter​, and edit those tokens appropriately, e.g.

formatter.py

@@ -151 +151 @@
     # Some constants used for clarifying the Wiki regexps:
 
     BOLDITALIC_TOKEN = "'''''"
-    BOLD_TOKEN = "'''"
-    ITALIC_TOKEN = "''"
+    BOLD_TOKEN = "**"
+    ITALIC_TOKEN = "//"
     UNDERLINE_TOKEN = "__"
     STRIKE_TOKEN = "~~"
     SUBSCRIPT_TOKEN = ",,"

It might even be interesting to see if we could have this notation in addition to the existing one.

[Christian Boos]

… and support for ​line breaks in ticket descriptions and comments, for the reasons given there.

The links using double brackets [[... link ...]] could probably be supported as well, as it should be easy to distinguish them from macro calls.

[anonymous]

Replying to cboos:

For supporting **bold text** and //italic text//, the current workaround is

…

formatter.py

@@ -151 +151 @@
     # Some constants used for clarifying the Wiki regexps:
 
     BOLDITALIC_TOKEN = "'''''"
-    BOLD_TOKEN = "'''"
-    ITALIC_TOKEN = "''"
+    BOLD_TOKEN = r"\*\*"
+    ITALIC_TOKEN = "//"
     UNDERLINE_TOKEN = "__"
     STRIKE_TOKEN = "~~"
     SUBSCRIPT_TOKEN = ",,"

of course :P)

[Christian Boos]

Adapt Trac WikiFormatting to be more compatible with WikiCreole

[Christian Boos]

In attachment:trac_wiki_creole-r4428.patch​:

• ​Bold And Italics compatibility
  • // and ** can be used as italic and bold markup, in addition to the existing ones '' and '''
  • they mix by pairs, e.g. you can't end a '' by a //.
• ​Links Internal And External compatibility
  • "|" can be used as a separator between the link and the label
  • simple square brackets or double square brackets can be used for links ([...] or [[...]])

All the existing wiki unit-tests still pass, so I think it's a good sign that this additions won't disturb existing Trac Wiki pages.

[Christian Boos]

WikiEngine refactoring and related fixes postponed. At that point, the (full) WikiCreole support could be easily added as a plugin.

[fcorreia@…]

just listening…

[dfraser]

There's a request for a plugin at ​th:#2863

[dfraser]

There is now such a plugin at ​th:wiki:WikiCreoleRendererPlugin

[Christian Boos]

Replying to dfraser:

There is now such a plugin at ​th:wiki:WikiCreoleRendererPlugin

Fine, but that only supports Creole itself, and there you can't use the more advanced Trac's WikiFormatting and most importantly, you can't use the TracLinks…

So I see in the comment:6 approach more useful, to have the regular Trac Wiki markup be a superset of the WikiCreole markup, or at least, move in that direction.

[Christian Boos]

Patch updated to current trunk, improved [[...]] link support.

[Christian Boos]

new version, adds support for forced line breaks (\\)

[Christian Boos]

Any comment on this one trac_wiki_creole-r9337.2.patch​?

[Remy Blank]

Oops, missed that one. I'll test it this evening.

[Remy Blank]

The patch seems to work fine, but I have to admit that the wiki parser and formatter code is still somewhat… opaque to me, so I can't really claim to have done a good review of the code. Still, +1.

Using the pipe as a separator between a link and its label is nice, as it avoids having to quote the link if it has spaces.

One question: why use <strong> for Trac-style bold, and <b> for WikiCreole bold? Same question for italic and <i> / <em>. Why not use the same element for both styles?

[Christian Boos]

Replying to rblank:

The patch seems to work fine, but I have to admit that the wiki parser and formatter code is still somewhat… opaque to me, so I can't really claim to have done a good review of the code. Still, +1.

Using the pipe as a separator between a link and its label is nice, as it avoids having to quote the link if it has spaces.

Yes, and it makes it easier to deal with non-CamelCase names, [[0.12/]] is more convenient to type than ["0.12/"].

One question: why use <strong> for Trac-style bold, and <b> for WikiCreole bold? Same question for italic and <i> / <em>. Why not use the same element for both styles?

This is an implementation quirk due to the way the simple_tag_handler works. I'll see what I can do.

[Christian Boos]

Patch queue committed in [9428:9431], which brings basic support for WikiCreole in Trac 0.12.

I've some good hope that in 0.13 we can get even better support (single pipe table syntax #6630, embedding links {{image.png}}, …).