Help:Gobby

Gobby extension links gobby software with the mediawiki. Together they allow for rich output thanks to wiki syntax and simultaneous collaboration on a single wiki page by multiple users .

Features of the extension

work on content of any wiki page with others collaboratively in real time

direct import of pages from wiki to gobby

see wiki output as you write (you still need to refresh the page but we will try to do something about it)

full wiki syntax is supported, so you can use templates, graphs, charts, images, tables, etc.

preview, if needed, can be limited to only logged in users

3 dedicated pages available in wiki for simultaneous collaboration Sandbox1, Sandbox2 and Sandbox3 (more can be created if needed)

on page notices when sandbox is empty or contains just white spaces

Gobby usage

All the documents in gobby are available for anybody who connects.

Folders and subfolders

To organize work, one can create folders and subfolders and put documents inside them.

Saving documents

Keep in mind that to store a document on your disk, you need to press on "Save" button. The version which is served by gobby can change meanwhile when you are offline, so if you want to check what had been changed, use external tools (like meld or diff).

Server documents can be deleted by users as well, but your open tab will store the last version of the document even if something is deleted (as long someone who deletes a document from the server will not clear the content of the file first - then you may stay with an empty tab, so be sure you keep saving the work for yourself). We hope than in future we could provide a full history since the communication protocol of gobby seems to be just synchronizing key strokes. on the server side we enabled backups and syncing of content.

Syntax highlight

Giving to a file a name with a proper extension (like for example .py for python, .php for php, etc.) will invoke the syntax highlighter automatically, but you can at your option choose any syntax you wish, for any file, via Menu → View → Highlight → select from here.

Contributor's colors

By placing a mouse pointer over text, you can see a tool-tip showing who wrote part of text below the mouse pointer.

To remove contribution colors, click in the top menu View → Reset User Colors. It works for each user independently, so if you would like to remove colors from your editor, just go ahead.

Undo

The undo works for every user independently, so you can reverse changes only you make.

Import online documents

Gobby offers a great future to work with documents available online. To open an online document for collaboration, please choose your url and click within menu on "Open location..." This feature is useful for debugging CSS, JS, HTML files available all over internet.

Import wiki pages

To open a wiki page inside gobby, please choose the url you are interested (for example: http://rbose.org/wiki/Test) and add to it the string '?action=raw'. You should end up with something like: http://rbose.org/wiki/Test?action=raw - this will import only the content from the wiki page preserving mediawiki syntax. After editing in gobby, you still need to copy the text to wiki and click "Preview" to watch how it looks rendered, or use some other external renderer (hopefully we will create something soon to make this process much easier).

Opening documents with command line

Use as well system command line to open documents from your disk or remote locations (for example sftp:// etc.)

Preferences

You can customize settings of your editor in Preferences.

Export to other formats

You can export a document to html.

Contact to gobby developers

To contact gobby's developers you may join #infinoted channel at freenode (direct link: irc://irc.freenode.com:8002/infinoted)

Ideas for further development

• add ajax wrapper to preview pages
• maybe beside edit, move, discussion, ... tabs add a gobby tab, so every page could have its own preview
• to avoid manual copy/paste of content back to the wiki, add maybe a Save gobby draft button in the wiki to save documents with nick of the user who will press it, then prompt the usrer for modification summary
• disable display counter on sandbox pages or place gobby preview in the special pages namespace, so wiki stats would be not affected by the amount of page refreshing

TODO