Re: [Slashcode-development] Slash Wiki plugin... Needs a home.

[Gerry G. <ge...@ge...>]

On 2003.12.08 13:24 Bill Skellenger wrote:
> Hi Gerry,
> 
> Gerry Gleason wrote:
> 
>> When I'm not thinking completely straight, I want to adapt this tool 
>> for use with Slashcode.  The idea would be a versioned content 
>> management systems for testing and development, then you would 
>> upload the content to the database as a complete release.  
>> Basically, I want the versioned content management system for the 
>> "authored" parts of the content, but I still want the comment system 
>> and fast database implementation of Slashcode.
> 
> 
> So it sounds like you basically want to have a Wiki, that only those 
> with privileges can edit -- (versioning is part of the Wiki), but 
> still have the comment system as implemented by Slash.  Sorry, just 
> thinking out loud so that I'm clear.

Some Wikis do versioning, but from what I've seen it isn't universal.  
I'm pretty sure the Slash plugin just updates the Wiki pages in the 
database, writing over the previous page contents.  That was the 
biggest reason I did not find it good enough.  It was a while ago, but 
I'm pretty sure I verified that this was the case.

> This is a great idea, and I bet that it wouldn't be too out of the 
> question to implement using chromatic's stuff as a base.  (I'm 
> assuming you're speaking of written content though, and not code 
> content)  The "upload file as bodytext" functions already exist 
> elsewhere, you could implement this without too much trouble 
> probably...

Like I said, I don't think it does the versioning.  There is also the
issue of just how much stuff you can edit with the web-interface, and 
whether that is versioned too.  I've already gone pretty far beyond the
basic Wiki functionality so that I can edit the templates with the same 
tool (this is a more or less 'pass-through' mode that I call HTML 
mode).  Even more powerful is the XML processing I've added later that 
supports pulling markup from several sources.

> I'd also like to look into chromatic's Wiki module, because this 
> could also be extended to allow more tags.  I looked around at other 
> Wikis and found that there are some tags like "==" that indicate a 
> <h2> font or whatever.  I saw another that made WikiWords in a grey 
> color if their page(s) hadn't been defined yet.  That was another 
> good idea.

That's a difficulty of Wikis, I don't think there is one common way of 
doing things.  In SubWiki, a WikiWord would just display as typed with 
a '?' after it linked to the add function for that page.  I was very 
disappointed in the quality of the HTML generated by the SubWiki 
formatter.  I'm sure that it varies a lot with other implementations, 
but all-in-all if find Wiki to be to much of a user oriented hack to 
use seriously.

> Regardless, I think the Wiki concept is pretty cool.  It was hard to 
> explain to the guys in my department.  Funny how something so simple 
> can be so effective.  For pages like FAQs and whatnot, it's the 
> ticket.  The problem is that I can't get people to contribute!!

Wikis have their proponents who think they are the greatest, but there 
is a learning curve.  It doesn't have the critical mass to make the 
case for it easily.

Gerry
> --Bill
> 
> 
>