MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group/Blog/2015-05-12

The Future of Template Editing?

Author: Chris Koerner

People: {{{1}}}

Tags: VisualEdtior, Templates, Editing, Forms,

I had a chance to play with the latest version of VisualEditor and was really impressed at how far template editing has become. For those of you who may not be familiar with VisualEditor, it uses an extension called TemplateData to define the fields and their options for editable templates. This way VisualEditor presents an easy to use interface - not too dissimilar to Semantic Forms.

The TemplateData tag is basic JSON and the documentation on the extension page is fairly comprehensive. You can define default text, types, required fields, and other common form-driven input options.

Here's a demo where I edit a Wikipedia page with VisualEditor and then modify fields inside of the inbox using TemplateData.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/JbVN5BapFEw?rel=0

What do you think? Could a future version of Semantic Forms work within VisualEditor? Do you use TemplateData on your own wiki? Drop me a note on the Talk page.