Re: [Phpwiki-talk] New PhpWiki on Sourceforge

[Arno H. <aho...@in...>]

Hi J C,

here are my two cents:

 >   -- PHPLib based authentication.
 >   -- Moving DB access under PHPLib

I'm not too keen on using PHPLib.
Authentication is easy to do oneself and the DB layer doesn't take dbm 
into account. Also, with advanced stuff to come, it might even be that 
the SQL itself has to be different.

 >   -- Editing and page creation only by people with accounts.
 >   -- Concept if "groups of users" ala Unix groups
 >   -- Concept of a page "belonging" to a user.
 >   -- Concept of that user granting edit rights to a named group.
 >   -- Ability for a user to transfer ownership (and therefore rights) 
 >      of a page from himself to another user.
 >   -- Ability to show an index of all the Wiki pages belonging to a
 >      particular user or group ("Owner Indexes").

These go all hand in hand. Although interesting, full support for
accounts is not a major issue for 1.2. Maybe for later releases.
I think the next big thing will be modularizing phpwiki. When this is
done, it should be easy to add accounts without too much hassle.

 >   -- Page histories with prior versions view available (encluding
 >      ownership changes).

We already have a diff in 1.1.6 - only the prior version though.
I assume that eventually this will develop into a full versioning system.

 >   -- Inter-version colourised diff-style views available of edited pages

Nice gimmick. Maybe Jeff is willing to implement this.

 >   -- Ability for a Wiki page to be attached/associated with another
 >      Wiki Page in the manner of a comment on the parent Wiki page.
 >      Such Wiki Comment Pages, as they are not stand-alone pages in
 >      their own right would be auto-named ala <UserID>.<Some_#> or such.
 >   -- Ability for such "comments" to be threaded and the entire
 >      thread tree to be displayed on a single page with indent-stlye
 >      threading.

I don't see how this could be useful. Could you give an example?
If I want to have threaded discussions I'd use something like phorum.

 >   -- Ability for a Wiki page to be "attached" to a non-Wiki page (eg
 >      local site URL).  Also, by extention, for Wiki threads to be so 
 >      rooted on URLs.

This can already be done. wiki_transform.php3 places all its output
into a variable, which can be processed further. The attaching
functionality has to be implemented by the non-Wiki page.

 >   -- Ability for a Wiki page to reference (special tag format) other
 >      Wiki pages or Wiki Comments in a page such that the contents of
 >      the referenced page are displayed in-line (perhaps via TreeDoc
 >      (http://www.softky.com/TreeDoc/)).  ("In-place Wiki")

Again, could you give an example why this is useful?

 >   -- Careful use of indexes and Meta-robots such that such Wiki
 >      networks are correctly search engine indexable.

We are working on that. What are meta-robots (or do you mean simple
web-bots indexing web pages?)


Maybe you should read about WikiEssence, WikiNature, etc. on c2.com.
IMHO, if you overload wiki with functionality it ceases to be a wiki.
But then, maybe that's your aim, i.e. creating something different
based on a wiki.

Especially, if you change the way topics are discussed within a wiki,
the whole thing will take on a totally different nature. Note: I'm not 
saying that discussion within wiki is perfect. But it contributes to
that wiki feeling that is part of wiki's attraction.

/Arno