[Phpwiki-talk] Is there a flow diagram for the components?

[Whit B. <wh...@tr...>]

Hi all,

Probably this is just a documentation request, but it would be really
helpful if there were a good visualization of the inter-relation of
PhpWiki's components, particularly the plugin design. The more I study it,
the more I can sense that there's something really elegant here - but also
the more it looks like any hacking of it requires an unusually thorough
overview, since the simplest actions are atomized so as to involve a dozen
files, so from the standpoint of wanting to add what in most scripted
applications would be a simple hack in an obvious place -- well, here it
requires a multi-layered appreciation of the design philosophy rather then
just grepping for the obvious code that does something and then changing it.

Well-written procedural code reads like a natural language, so doesn't need
extensive visualization. (Okay, very little of it is well-written, but in
principle....) Well-written OO like PhpWiki is much less
natural-language-like and much more like physical devices, so we could
really use a visual map of components, inheritences, dependencies, and
what's alterable by plugins, as compared to what's hard-wired by the base
code. I'd guess every member of the core team has a good visual map of the
whole territory in mind. But has anyone committed that map to a sketch that
can be shared?

Whit