Jim Groom and others have been getting excited lately tools and techniques for integrating blogs and wikis. A while ago we had worked on a one-off script to bring the content of a wiki directly into WordPress blog. The idea is similar to XML separation of content and display--wikis are fantastic as a collaborative writing space, but don't have the robustness for presentation that WordPress has. So, we worked on a quick-and-dirty, one-off way to bring content from the writing space of one wiki page and stuff it into WordPress, treating WordPress as the presentation space.

My wonderful wife Angela and her students have been blogging up a storm in two--count 'em TWO-- of her courses,"The Afterlife in Classical and Italian Traditions" and "Homer". T.S. Eliot might have called this "the superfetation of τὸ ἔν." We've talked off and on about finding ways to work with the Ancient Greek characters--here's a way to add them in to the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor used by WordPress, available for Drupal, and used in plenty of other apps. This will add the unicode Greek Extended block to tinyMCE's character map, which still means hunt-and-pecking your way through the Greek. That's clearly not so happy for a long passage, but it'll do the trick for shortish phrases.

N.B. Internet Explorer users seem to be out of luck on the unicode support. In using this, you might want to add a note that it looks better in Mozilla Firefox, and suggest that they get it here.

There are two parts--modifying the tinyMCE javascripts, then making sure that the character map is turned on in whatever application you are working with.

Step 1: Hack tinyMCE

The tinyMCE file you'll need to work with is charmap.js, located in your tinymce directory under themes/advanced/jscripts. The biggest section of it is a long array for all the special characters to include in the character map. Each entry in the array is another array with four elements: