WikiCreole markup

Hello, friends.

Up until now, CurseForge and WowAce (since the transformation to the CurseForge codebase) have used "Curse Wiki" as the default wiki type. We have implemented the feature-rich WikiCreole markup and plan to make it the default on Monday (March 9, 2009).

What's wrong with Curse Wiki?

Curse Wiki is a custom implementation of the MediaWiki markup. The code we use for it is rife with issues, including lack of readability, inherent slowness, potential security issues and general bugs, and lack of extensibility.

The developer of the Curse Wiki format has no longer been with us here at Curse, Inc. for a year now, and no one can read his code, and when anyone tries, it's impossible to cringe.

Why choose WikiCreole over something else?

We agree with the philosophy of WikiCreole, the code is clean and readable, it's fast enough for our use cases, and the library we use (CreoleParser) is very extensible.

Due to the awesome extensibility, we were able to add nice relative links, e.g. [[Some page]] or [[Project:Some page]] rather than forcing full links as we have. We also support images nicely, e.g. {{4}} or {{Some image}} or {{Project:4}} (and so forth).

We were also able to add syntax highlighting with the <<code>> macro.

print("Syntax highlighting is awesome: " .. 42)

See Markup Types / WikiCreole for the full syntax examples of WikiCreole.

Will I still be able to use Curse Wiki?

Yes, this will still be an option, just not the default one.

We may eventually disable creating new pages/comments using Curse Wiki (likely if a security issue arises), but we would still allow old pages using it to continue to be editted as Curse Wiki.

Are you getting rid of any of the other markup formats?

Probably not. We've cleaned up the code for plain text and Safe HTML, and made BBCode a thin wrapper around WikiCreole, so we see no reason to remove those three at all.

We may eventually support more formats, such as Textile, Markdown, Restructured Text, etc.

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