Fixing MoinMoin for Firefox 3
I’ve been trying out the Firefox 3 betas lately, and have been impressed. But I’ve noticed a big problem with the WYSIWYG editor in the MoinMoin wiki (which runs a small wiki I have on my home network). When I try to click the “link” button on the toolbar, the ensuing popup window is completely blank, instead of showing a nice dialog box as it should. This also happens with any other popup dialog box in the editor. Since Firefox 3 will likely be the standard browser around the house when the next Ubuntu upgrade comes in April, this poses a problem.
So I decided to find out what was going on, and if there was anything I could do about it. The first round of Googling was not encouraging. MoinMoin uses FCKeditor to provide its WYSIWYG editing capability, but it uses very out-of-date version. The FCKeditor folks did a bunch of fixes for Firefox 3, but MoinMoin hasn’t updated their copy to pick up the changes. There’s a bug report for the issue on the MoinMoin site, but there appeared to be no activity on fixing it. Attempting to simply replace MoinMoin’s copy of FCKeditor with the new version failed miserably; there was a JavaScript alert dialog on practically every keystroke, and with little knowledge of the underlying code, there was no way I could figure out the problem.
After doing some more digging into what the exact Firefox 3 incompatibility was, I found that Firefox has an issue with a window opened with the JavaScript flag “modal=yes”. Further, the discussion in the FCKeditor bug tracker pointed me to a patch that fixed the problem. Unfortunately, there has been quite a bit of refactoring in the codebase, and I couldn’t simply apply the patch to the copy MoinMoin has (the file mentioned doesn’t even exist in the MoinMoin version); I had to backport it. After looking around the directory tree in /usr/share/moin/htdocs/applets/FCKeditor, I was able to find a similar spot in the code, and make the change. Here are the steps:
- Fire up your favorite editor and open $MOIN_HOME/wiki/applets/FCKeditor/editor/js/fckeditorcode_gecko_2.js. If you’ve installed MoinMoin from an Ubuntu package, $MOIN_HOME/wiki is /usr/share/moin/htdocs.
- Search on the string modal=yes. It should be on a line that looks something like this:
var J="location=no, menubar=no, toolbar=no, dependent=yes, dialog=yes, minimizable=no, modal=yes, alwaysRaised=yes"+", resizable="+(G?'yes':'no')+", width="+D+", height="+E+", top="+H+", left="+I;
- Remove the “modal=yes,” (include the comma).
- Clear your browser cache.
After that, I was able to edit my MoinMoin wiki with all the Firefox 3 goodness.
Update 3/21: The MoinMoin developers have checked in the fix, so this won’t be a problem in the next version (1.6.2) of MoinMoin!
Update 4/7: With the fix, the link editor now inserts invalid links. We’re not done yet.
Creative Title Here 
With Firefox 3.0 final, the problem remains. I tried to remove modal=yes, but it did not help. I made some tries with both versions 2 and 3 of Firefox installed on the same machine, to be sure to have the same environment (java librairies ..). The conclusion is clear: I got the links perfectly formed with FF2, and empty ones with FF3. (This is true for the wiki and URL links; including an image seems to work). I also use Plone as CMS, and have similar results with the dialog window used to create the links.
I also tried Opera, but the WYSIWYG editor did not even render the editing window correctly.
I know. However, the problem goes much deeper than I initially thought, and will probably require significant changes to the WYSIWYG editor. I don’t really have the time to fix it, so I’ve switched to MediaWiki instead.