Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Re: 1.4 release

[Adam S. <ad...@pe...>]

> 	Thanks for asking.  Most of what I've done is
> user-specific style, layout and formatting, with a few minor hack
> bits thrown in for navigation as well. Nothing really that ports,
> I'm afraid. Look and feel stuff.

would you mind mailing a url to a screenshot or something?  i'm curious
what you've done.
 
> 	Biggest formatting change is to move almost all the links
> etc to the left side of each page (table) which makes the wiki
> easier to navigate IMO, especially for new visitors. Whitespace
> and page blocking is important IMO, the standard Wiki is too
> text-dense on the page. Sorry I don't have a publicly visible
> example of my formatting changes at the moment.

i run a public wiki and had similar complaints from users and concerns
from myself.  one of the biggest things i didn't/don't like was that
with the standard wiki "look and feel" is that there is no site
consistancy.  it's very space efficient which is great when you are are
familiar with the site but for people who found a page on our site from
another site (or google) they had no idea what we, as a whole, were
about and there was no immediately obvious way for them to find out. 
you can see the really ugly hack i did to moinmoin here:

 http://www.personaltelco.net/

my long term goal on what i will do is have a a small navigation bar
across the top and bottom (edit, like pages, spell check, attach file
etc) and then down teh side have the equivelent of slashboxes for these
things:

* if not logged in get an intro to wiki box (welcome, yes your supposed
  to be able to edit the pages and please do ... responsibly).
* if they are logged in the get the last X  number of recent changes or
  maybe full recent changes or recent edits.
* the X most popular wiki pages
* the list of categories on the wiki (eg CategoryCategory)

other ideas for boxes:

* relevant rss/rdf feeds from other sites (weblogs, wiki's etc)
* a page status box (number of pages, hits/minute/etc ... geek stuff)
* maybe a calendar with upcoming events
* maybe a list of the X most active wiki users (friendly competition can
  be a good motivator :-)
* an rdf/rss of the last X messages from our mailing list (i don't know
  why no one has written a parser for mailman yet)
* a unified recent changes for all of the other community networking
  groups
* recent changes from our node map database
* the list goes on and on :-)

ideally all of these boxes would be imported from rss/rdf sources and
parsed with something like fase4php.  even more ideally all of this
would be configurable on a per user basis (to control which or if there
are any boxes).

so ... there's my grand scheme of things that i'm slowly working
towards, i'd love to hear about what you're trying to achive and what
you've done so far to get there.  our wiki is a crucial part of the
personal telco community (in someways it's built stronger ties then our
mailing list, though it has built much fewer).  it's also our main
presence to the world which is important as well.

adam.