[Phpwiki-talk] FootNotes, Tables, The end of PHP3, I'm still alive, etc...

[Jeff D. <da...@da...>]

Hi.

Yes I'm still alive!
Great work everyone on the current 1.2.0 release.
Sorry I disappeared so suddenly.
I'm back, at least for a bit.

You didn't ask (well actually you just did, at least on one of these),
but here's my snooty opinions on a bunch of things:

The move to PHP4:

  My (cheap) virtual host provider is still running
  only PHP3.  I've put in a request to fix that, but who know when that
  might happen.  I'm sure others are in the same boat.  Is there really
  a pressing reason to drop support for PHP3?

Tables:

  I personally like the idea of tables --- I've wanted to use them
  on several occasion.

  As for what markup to use, I have no strong feeling other than that
  I think one should avoid raw HTML.  (Remind me what's wrong with
  the bar ('|') based mark-ups?)  I think the markup should provide
  for left-adjust, right-adjusted, and centered columns.

  So count one vote for tables.

Footnotes:

  If there's a push for keeping the mark-up simple, why footnotes?
  Carrying the references around as page meta-data has been a
  pain-in-the-database-code.  Why not just get rid of it all?

  So count one vote against footnotes.

  We also need to think about how to deal with the references on
  the existing pages.   My vote is to make the restore-from-zip-archive
  tag some text with the references onto the bottom of the page.

When to Archive:

  If I edit a page that was last edited by myself six months ago,
  I would like the old contents of the page to be archived.
  
  I propose that the edit form should have a checkbox labeled
  "This is a minor edit, do not archive".  The default state of
  the checkbox should depend on the whether the current author matches
  the previous author, and also on the time since last edit.

  What do y'all think?  I'll add it if you give the go-ahead.

Archiving Multiple Versions:

  This has been talked about forever.  Back before I disappeared, 
  I suggested a database API which handled this.  You guys apparently
  didn't like it (that's okay).

  I think this needs to be made a high priority, or it will never get done.

User ID's / Logins:

  I think they're a good idea.  (Useful for some sites, at least.)
	
Security:

  On machines where httpd runs as 'nobody' (or similar), admin.php must
  be world readable.  This allows anyone with an account on the machine
  access to the username and password in admin.php (same problem for
  the sql password in config.inc).

  Is there a solution?

PATH_INFO:

  Whatever happened to page names in PATH_INFO?  Did that get nixed for
  a good reason?  Or just because I never did it.

  If it's okay, I'll try to add it again.  Should it be switchable in 
  the config file?

  On a related note, there's a bug:

  Currently 'index.php?zip=all' will get you to the wiki page named 'zip=all'.
  This is probably a bad idea ('zip=all' is an allowable page name, 
  but it should have to be url-encoded.)
  I'll fix this unless you object.

I think that's it for now.

Jeff