Re: [Phpwiki-talk] New PhpWiki on Sourceforge

[J C L. <cl...@ka...>]

On Mon,  3 Jul 2000 23:34:23 +0200 (MEST) 
Arno Hollosi <aho...@in...> wrote:

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

> I'm not too keen on using PHPLib.  

I need to integrate into an envionment which is PHPLib based.

> Authentication is easy to do oneself and the DB layer doesn't take
> dbm into account.

<nod>  I've noticed that I very rarely ever do pages any more that
don't involve an SQL backend somehow.  

> Also, with advanced stuff to come, it might even be that the SQL
> itself has to be different.

Easy to abstract and change.  There's been discussion of this lately
on the PHPLib list in regard to moving from MySQL to Oracle (which
I'll probably be doing eventually) and how to make that transition
easy with the various SQL differences.

>> -- 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.

Perhaps I should restate my original post.  What I listed are some
of the things I'll be doing.  I'm starting from a base of PHPWiki.
I'd like to not work against the PHPWiki developers in doing this,
but it is what I'm doing with a timetable on the order of a few
months.  

>> -- 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?

Part of the intent is to use a Wiki as a) a corporate documentation
and research system, and b) as a meta-level evaluation system which
runs in parallel with a pre-established Wiki or non-Wiki site.  cf:
http://crit.org/

> If I want to have threaded discussions I'd use something like
> phorum.

Think of phorum constructed entirely of WikiItems.  Now think of
that both as the main site along with various other static pages,
and as a parallel meta layer commenting, evaluating, and referencing
the main site.

That's what I'm doing.

>> -- 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.

<nod>  I'd like something a little more elegant (piping thru PHPLib
templates among other things), but yes.

>> -- 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?

Consider a researcher mining a Wiki farm and constructing a Wiki
document of notes on what he found and evaluated, in-place quoting
the other WikiItems he referenced.

>> -- 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?)

The Meta robots entry ala:

  <meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

Given that in the system I describe the content of a given WikiItem
may simultaneously appear in multiple contexts (as a stand-alone
item, as part of a threaded WikiDiscussion, abstracted as a quoted
WikiItem into another WikiPage, etc) providing suitable clues for
external search engines to make searching as useful as possible
takes a little thought.  I need Google and AltaVista to be able to
usefully index the resulting WikiWeb (you don't want 20 matches to
the same item in different contexts).

> Maybe you should read about WikiEssence, WikiNature, etc. on
> c2.com.  

Yes, I'm familiar with those documents and with Wikis in general.  I
realise that what I'm creating is not really a classical Wiki, and
in many ways deliberately sunders the basic design models and
assumptions of classical Wiki.  This is intentional.

> IMHO, if you overload wiki with functionality it ceases to be a
> wiki.  

Yup.  If I wanted a straight Wiki I'd be using any of the several
dozen already out there rather than building something new.

> But then, maybe that's your aim, i.e. creating something different
> based on a wiki.

Exactly.  My intent is to extend the benefits of Wiki on an
architectural scale to entire web sites.

> Especially, if you change the way topics are discussed within a
> wiki, the whole thing will take on a totally different nature.

Bingo.  Wiki has been done.  

> 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.

Agreed.  When viewed a particular way what I'm really doing is
adding the ability for the author of a WikiItem to define an
explicit for his WikiItem (as versus being a purely abstracted
node), and for others to then explicitly place that WikiItem and
others in new contexts without invalidating or altering the original
context, and to then allow those contexts to be manipulated as
definitions in their own rights.

-- 
"Finally coming home"                       Home: cl...@ka...
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--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--