In Snow Leopard with Safari 4.0.5, the editor appeared to work, allowing me to create a new page and use the WYSIWYG editor as I pleased... until I tried to edit a page. When editing a page, by default the wikitext editor appears with the correct contents of the page. But as soon I switch to FCKeditor, all of the text disappears, leaving me with a blank slate. Then, when I switch back to the wikitext editor, all I see are six alarming characters: $nbsp;. Everything in the page was effectively erased.
In Snow Leopard with Firefox 3.6.3, FCKeditor would not load at all. Whenever I tried to switch to the rich text editor, I would get a totally mysterious error in the Error Console.
Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.statusText]" nsresult: "0x80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE)" location: "JS frame :: http://www.northeastern.edu/cpspedia/wiki/skins/common/ajax.js?207 :: anonymous :: line 124" data: no]
In Windows with IE8, FCKeditor would also failed to load with the same visual symptoms as experienced with Firefox in Snow Leopard. To Microsoft's credit, IE8 did produce a more useful error message than I had previously encountered.
Webpage error details
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Timestamp: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 23:17:16 UTC
Message: Access is denied.
Line: 107
Char: 3
Code: 0
URI: http://www.northeastern.edu/cpspedia/wiki/skins/common/ajax.js?207
Months ago, I had searched high and low over the web and found nothing useful to help me solve this problem.
With renewed determination this time around, since there was a larger user buy-in and more at stake to have a successful deployment of MediaWiki, I tried to tackle the problem again. Hitting the same walls as I did previously, I was almost ready to give up and file a bug with CKEditor and cross my heart hoping to die that CKEditor would troubleshoot the issue with me. I even found a tip in the "FCKeditor integration guide" that sounded exactly like the solution for me, but it seemed suboptimal and more importantly did not work.
After spending almost three hours this time around on the same problem, I took one last shot by diving into wiki/skins/common/ajax.js. There, going to line 107, I found a lone function call with three parameters, one of which was called uri. When I used alert() to examine the three parameters, I almost jumped from my seat as I realized what the problem was.
The URI being passed to the function had an internal base server name and not the external server name that I was using to access the wiki in my browsers!
Digging through some MediaWiki documentation, I found a reference to $wgServer and found out that this variable was not set in LocalSettings.php. Once I set this variable with the correct server name, all was well.
Correction: All is well.
Goodness... what a trip.
