Taming the SharePoint Wiki

Our current project team decided to post development documents, guidelines, specs etc in a SharePoint site dedicated to project. We also decided we would try a Wiki to post coding standards and best practices, samples, tips on using certain WPF controls etc.

So, SharePoint Wiki is really convenient to set up. Add a new site, choose the Wiki template and you are off an running. That is until you decide you are going to try to add some serious amount of content. The built in editor is good for only simple pages and the image upload feature is … well … less than perfect shall we say. After attempting to upload my first image 3 times with no success, I started looking for other options. In my search I found a question on StackOverflow that led to a great work-around for me. Not sure if this has been posted elsewhere but I felt it was worth a shout-out.

In answer to a question about potential reasons to not use SP Wikis, jfaughnan posted an answer that included his approach to getting around the lousy editor experience in the Wiki:

“There is a convoluted workaround that I use. It takes advantage of the superb SharePoint support and image editing integrated with Windows Live Writer.

  1. Create a SP blog that will hold the images that will be referenced in the wiki.
  2. Use Windows Live Writer to post to the wiki-image-blog. Drop your image into WLW, resize it as needed, etc. If you like, use WLW to write your image associated wiki text first draft as well.
  3. After you post to the Wiki, copy and paste image and text into the Wiki editor rich text field.

This takes surprisingly little time, far less than any other option I've read of. I admit, it is convoluted.”

The author calls it “convoluted”, actually I found it to be a sheer stroke of genius. 15 minutes later I had my “staging blog” set up as a new site, had LiveWriter configured to post to the blog and was up and running with a nice editor, formatting for code samples and cut-and-paste and resize for pictures. LiveWriter handles uploading the images to the blog site. Once your new Wiki content is posted, open the post to edit in the blog site, copy the raw contents and paste them, images and all, into a new Wiki page. Tweak a few links and you are good to go.

Posted on ASP.NET Weblogs        © Copyright 2009 - Andreas Zenker

2 Comments

  • Great Workaround,

    but the "real" problem is still unsolved. The SharePoint Wiki is a really handy feature, our team is using it for our whole documentation.. but some features I'm still missing are built-in image/attachment support and the possibility to create paragraphs, and link to them aswell..

    and, may the way you describe be a good workaround, it is still not that perfect, and you cannot go to a client and tell him this..

  • Philipp: agreed. This is just a "work-around" for when the decision has already been made and we have to work with it the best we can.

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