[Phpwiki-talk] A gripe about SQL coding in phpWiki

[John S. <jst...@gm...>]

Hi All,
<RANT>
I hate to be a pain about this, and I know I am limited by an enterprise
decision to use Oracle for all SQL backends, but I find the SQL coding and
the lack of any real developer documentation a HUGE downside to this wiki. =
I
decided to implement it at my employer as I am a great advocate of Wiki for
all types of collaborative documentation, and it suits the PHP/Oracle SOE
here. The basic Wiki runs fine, and people are beginning to use it and take
it up.

The problem nows becomes, how do we make this stuff available off-line?
Well, just dump out to html right? Wrong. Firstly there are errors where th=
e
FileFinder.php where it sets the locale to C, and no such locale exists.
This occurs for a lot of "plugin" pages. Then if you are are able to get
around that one, there is the small problem really bad SQL programming. I
mean "WHERE NULL =3D NULL" and "WHERE 1" which causes Oracle to barf. Prett=
y
bad programming style when these are used to simply let a lazy programmer
append " AND something=3D$somvariable" to a conditional clause, rather than=
 do
some testing of variables and processing them accordingly. And if you are
going to do it the lazy way, shouldn't you be doing it in a non SQL
implementation specific way? Come on!

And searching throuth the code, there seems to be ways to include a list of
"excluded pages" but since the coding documentation is basically
non-existent this is impossible to fathom. And the lack of documentation
explaining an easy way to do it would also be helpful. I mean, isn't this
really what wiki is about?

Oracle did not work out of the box, and I posted my changes on the phpWiki
Wiki. Have these been included in the latest releases and patches? No. Is
there any easy way to find out how to contribute to this project? Well, I
must be blind 'cause I haven't found much detail on that either. So what
happens if you guys release patches? I have to trawl through the code each
time and make the same changes to make my oracle implementation work. A rea=
l
pain for me, but if I want a Wiki at work (and god knows we need one) this
is what I have to do. Such an overhead will ensure that Wiki will die here.

I am more than willing to contribute to the development of the Oracle part
of the wiki. We have resources to run testing here. But I need a wiki that
will work and will be well maintained, with cross backend code and non-lazy
programming and documentation, particularly in the code. This lack is
probably limiting the development, debugging and maintainability of this
project and it should be rectified.
</RANT>
Regards
John