[drupal-devel] Re: Jimmy Wales

[Sheldon Rampton]

Jonathan Chaffer wrote:

>- He said it would be great if we had the ability to make a special
>syntax like double-brackets link automatically to Wikipedia. I briefly
>explained our filter system, and said that if he wanted we could knock
>out such a filter in an afternoon. Looking in contrib, it looks like
>interwiki.module can do this already; maybe it's just a matter of code
>review.

Aldon Hynes and I wrote interwiki.module specifically for this 
purpose. It can handle both single brackets and double brackets. 
Wikipedia's MediaWiki syntax uses both; double brackets are for 
internal links within Wikipedia, and single brackets are for external 
hyperlinks.

There are other aspects of MediaWiki's simplified markup syntax that 
also might be worth emulating.  For example, an asterisk at the 
beginning of a line translates into a <li> tag, with surrounding <ul> 
as needed. A pound sign translates into <li> with surrounding <ol>. 
And, list markup can be nested, e.g.,

*this item has three sub-items
*#the first
*#the second
*#the third
*this item has no sub-items
*this item has two
*#alpha
*#beta

Personally, I'd like to see a Drupal module version of the MediaWiki 
software, but creating it would require more programming skill than I 
possess.

--Sheldon Rampton