Re: [Phpwiki-talk] 1.3.x series

[Aredridel <are...@nb...>]

> 
> As 1.2 is shaken down, and I don't expect a lot of bugs at this point,
> it's not too soon to think about the 1.3.x series.
> 
> I think there are some obvious things to drop, like:
> 
> references (that is, [1] [2] links)
> support for 3.x PHP
> dbmlib.php

By all means. Let's drop it. Perhaps put footnotes code in instead of
references (ala NBTSCWiki)?

> I'd like to see some cruft cleaned out as well. Perhaps a rewrite of
> transform.php (we've talked about modularizing it for a long time), and
> drop all the old tab markup.

Mmm, yes. I've been thinking of a way to add NBTSCWiki-style markup (which I
prefer, since it's almost as readable in text as rendered) to PHPWiki
without disrupting things, but I'm not able to think of a way yet.

> Perhaps the most requested feature, which I would like to see, is
> authentication. I would like a model that follows the mailing list: the
> user must have a valid email address. When they register, a link is
> emailed to them that they must follow to validate the account, or perhaps
> we can just mail out the password. Their account name will already be used
> in RecentChanges when they edit a page. This can be configured so it
> doesn't work at all (like PhpWiki is now).

Authentication can be made modular rather easily. I've already done a
passable implementation using HTTP-auth on the NBTSC Wiki. I've -almost- got
a web-form-and-cookie based implementation sitting around too, that could be
extended with a little scripting to do mailout-based account creation.

> Second, a more permanent archive. Pages should live longer than one
> version. This can be configured to zero, ten, one hundred previous pages.

Oh, -yes!-.

I've been pondering using a CVS-like branching system for storing page
changes -- totally eliminating need for page locking for edits, as well as,
if the implementation had a simple interface, would allow a Wiki to have
clean pages, without censoring people who wish to be offensive -- just
branch, and make the clean branch the "main" one.

Really, I want to be able to see diffs of fifteen versions, since every now
and again, I travel and can't keep up on Wiki.

> Third, I still long for a better search interface than what we have now
> (which doesn't work too bad, but could be better).

ooh, yeah... what can we work up, here? I'd like to use regexps, but I'm a
regexp nut. There's also SQL-like wildcards (% and _) and globs (*, ?, {x,y}
and [a-q]) that'd be nice as syntax, as well as altavista like boolean ops--
+foo -bar or standard boolean (and/or/xor/not)

> Any navigational aids we can contrive would help, like SiteMap, or
> HotLinks or whatever.

Mmm, and I'd love to see 'em as modules, enablable by adding the block to a
template or uncommenting something or setting a config variable. I still
don't like templates that much (which is why I like PHP so much), but it
makes a lot of sense in many ways.

> Just some food for thought...

Mmm! Brain food! Need fish crackers...

Ari