Last modified: 2014-11-13 17:44:39 UTC
The VisualEditor extension currently requires a Parsoid instance to handle wikitext (cf. $wgVisualEditorParsoidURL in VisualEditor.php). This makes installing and using the extension very difficult (or impossible) for third-party users wishing to use the extension with their MediaWiki installations. Ideally, calling out to an external Parsoid instance should not be necessary.
Re-wording to be specific. I know Gabriel (and Tim Starling) are already looking at solutions to this issue.
Our plan is to port Parsoid to a C library and interface it to PHP as an extension and (for shared hosting) as a near-static binary following Tim's strategy for Lua. We have some issues to address in the JS implementation before we embark on that, so don't expect that to happen before October. We could later also port Parsoid to pure PHP, but PHP's less-than-stellar performance for memory-heavy workloads would make this only useful for very small wikis. See http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?test=binarytrees for a fun memory-heavy benchmark.
Mass-moving bugs into the new 'Parsoid' product.
See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Roadmap for our latest plans on this. Our plan is to support HTML-only wikis with VisualEditor without any dependency on Parsoid.
