Re: [Phpwiki-talk] New jeffshacks snapshot.

[Steve W. <sw...@pa...>]

On Sat, 15 Sep 2001, Jeff Dairiki wrote:

> > it would be nice, i think, to be able to use a wike as an evolving story
> > and have weblog style comments attached to it.
>
> Yes.  I think Steve (Wainstead) has expressed interest in this idea as
> well.
> I think the idea for how to hook this into the wiki is to introduce
> "page types"
> --- the type of a page determines how it gets displayed (and edited).
> Straightforward, I think, but I'm not going to work on it, at this
> point.

That was my idea some time ago. Conceptually, you can keep a weblog in one
of two ways:

1) You hand edit the Wiki markup every time you enter a new item. This is
obviously the hard way, but one can start today with no code changes ;-)

2) You have a sort of "helper form" to aid you in the formatting. It would
just be a series of <input>s for title, time, category, author, summary.
At some point I thought about other "types" of pages, and why not make
this process generic?

This is a sort of counterpart to the display templates... or perhaps,
something to be hacked into the templates? Is there any reason why we
can't use templates to create edit forms?

Then the next issue was database structure. This is where it gets to the
point where you want the pages stored as XML so you can have different
page types which transmogrify into whatever output you want (RSS, XHTML,
plain text, png image files, binary gibberish... you get the idea) and now
we should simply incorporate and sell the damn thing. I mean, it sounds
like WORK! ;-) But it's also the Right Thing, and we get into "don't let
the best be the enemy of the good," and all that philosophy about coding
and design.

Ahem. My preference for "Worse Is Better" would say, hack in a new form
for a WikiLog, or WikiWikiWebLog, or whatever you want to call it; later
someone will merge it into the template engine, and later someone will
generalize it so you can have multiple input forms for multiple page
types...

sorry for the ramble, but the escape from recent events is good.

cheers
~swain

---
                  http://www.panix.com/~swain/
"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring
production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
                     -- Frank Zappa
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