Old Tools for the New Web #1: Sun Wiki Publisher

Just spotted on Lifehacker.com is this announcement of an extension from Sun Microsystems that allows you to edit a MediaWiki page from within OpenOffice. MediaWiki is one of the most powerful wiki tools available (it powers Wikipedia) but it also has the most complex syntax. Because it works like a word processor, the Sun Wiki Publisher extension may be just what you need to exploit a Mediawiki installation with minimum pain.

Update: I just intalled OpenOffice and the Sun Wiki Publisher (itself a challenge on Vista!) and gave the wiki publisher a whirl. A serious issue is that though it will write a document created in OpenOffice Writer as a new page in a MediaWiki wiki, you can't open a MediaWiki page for editing. This means that the tool has a write once feature and thereafter you presumably maintain the page in MediaWiki markup through a browser. Even so, it may still prove to be useful in getting a lot of content into a wiki (perhaps even from content that is imported from MS Word) and for this reason alone it is probably worth a longer evaluation. Perhaps the developers are working on round-tripping for the next version.

OpenOffice, MediaWiki and the Sun Wiki Publisher extension are all free (as in beer and as in speech) and open source.