Re: [Phpwiki-talk] New User General Questions

[Reini U. <ru...@x-...>]

Oliver Betz schrieb:
> Reini Urban wrote:
>>> There are two developers only, but many users.
>>
>>> I still see no active "community".
>>
>> Yes, as I said, it's not visible here.
>
> where is it visible? Maybe...

Between 50 and 100 messages per month is not so bad.
https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=phpwiki-talk
In the last two years it settled because users went away.
But new features and fixes are still happening in the same pace as before.

>> I'm still presenting phpwiki on various wiki conferences and barcamps,
>> but as Patrick Michaud, the pmwiki developer, we have more to do with
>> our perl compiler projects, Patrick for perl6, me for perl5, besides
>> our real work as knowledge engineers.
>>
>> Marc-Etienne has his users behind the Alcatel-Lucent firewall, my
>> users are behind the AVL firewall. Both are companies with>2500
>> developers.
>
> ...in these two companies? So PhpWiki became a somewhat private
> thing?

It's still open and free. It's still on sourceforge, though sf sucks.

>> I believe Google or Zend have less developers if you want to play the
>> number game.
>
> I don't understand what you want to express here.
>
>>>>> * Many plugins, in my opinion more, better and easier than mediawiki
>>>>> plugins. mediawiki just has easier syntax plugins.
>>>>
>>>> For example? Where are these plugins documented?
>>
>> Every plugin has its help page.
>
> Well, most of them are not really helpful to me, and I guess there
> are other "clueless" users.
>
>> You can e.g. see them at
>> http://phpwiki.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/phpwiki/trunk/pgsrc/
>> at Help%2F*Plugin
>> Doesn't look too hard to find.
>
> How should the average user guess the SVN path? There is not even a
> link to the SVN repository on the web page.

The average user has his installation or link to the wiki, and does not 
need svn.

> The average user might try to install the "stable" (read: old) or
> "current" version and see the documentation coming with the
> installation files. In this documentation, there are many links to
> the broken sourceforge PhpWiki site.

This is via interwiki links, and the new installations changed Help: to 
Help/

>> Not every applications needs an online demo site.
>
> But it needs much more documentation. The old PhpWiki site had some
> extended documentation, and now it's gone. The "community" has no
> place to add knowledge today.

The community can ask to add to the official docu via email or svn.
Almost every SW development happens like this.
We were just lucky to have a demo on sf.net.

>> We would like to have some demo site online again, but we need a
>> server. Since we are not at the university anymore, rather in big
>> companies we don't have such a server ready.
>
> and the big companies don't want to support the open source project
> they get benefit from? Some server space would be peanuts for them.

Not really. Big companies are different. They rather pay for a 
commercial SW millions than support a cheap open source SW.
My company paid millions for MS Sharepoint Server license, and it still 
has only 10% of the phpwiki features.
They also pay millions for Oracle while a really good and fast database 
would be free.

> [...]
>
>> BTW: All this is no user support.
>> A user would have found it by himself.
>
> I disagree strongly.
>
>> And we really don't need to persuade others to use it.
>
> That seems to be the point. IMO PhpWiki is no more a public supported
> and used project.

The main problem is the server. I don't want to afford one, I asked 
several times, but no one sprang in. So there will be no demo site.
It's also easier to keep it spam-free this way.

> That's sad.

Indeed.
-- 
Reini Urban
http://phpwiki.org/  http://murbreak.at/