WikiWebLogs and PartialLocks (was Re: [Phpwiki-talk] New jeffshacks snapshot. )

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

> 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. ....

The other thing you might want from a wiki-weblog is enforced 
append-only
semantics.

This all ties in with the desire to write-protect portions of a page.

I think it was Reini who, some time ago, suggested a couple of ideas:
  1. Append-only pages.
  2. Partially locked pages --- only the part after the first <hr> 
("--------" )
     can be edited.  (Except by the page owner, of course.)
Both seem like clean solutions to the partial locking problem.  (Of 
course
they are of limited use until user authentication is implemented more 
completely.)

Which brings us to user authentication.

I recently had an idea: require every registered user to have a 
WikiHomepage.
The user's userid would be the same as the pagename of their homepage.
This accomplishes several things:
  1. Each user has a homepage (which would be linked to from 
RecentChanges, etc..)
     My guess is that most on wikis with authenticated users, each of 
the
     authenticated users would have a WikiHomepage with personal 
thoughts,
     contact information, etc. in any case. 
  2. We could store the users meta-data (password, e-mail, etc...) as 
part of
     their homepages meta-data.  This eliminates the need for a 
separate
     user database.

Disadvantages:  Somewhat kludgy, perhaps.   Somewhat restrictive: if a 
pagename
already exists, one must somehow usurp it (perhaps with admin 
assistance ?)
to use it as a userid.

Is this a crackpot idea or a stroke of genious?

Jeff