[Pmwiki-users] Functionality of groups (was: Why groups?)

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Sat Jun 12 16:34:40 CDT 2004


On Sat, Jun 12, 2004 at 06:27:50PM +0200, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, Steven Leite wrote:
> > 
> > I'm particularly fond of the way I can create a template or new config
> > file on a perGroup or perPage basis.
> 
> I also like the ability to do per-group customization, but I wonder if we 
> aren't letting the current implementation steer us here. What is it really 
> that we want to accomplish?

I have to disagree with the notion that we may be "letting the
current implementation steer us (or at least me) here."  The current
group implementation wasn't chosen arbitrarily or programmed by accident
it was what I came up with after examining and deliberately rejecting
a number of organizational schemes, including both single and hierarchical
namespaces.  The one-level grouping scheme that PmWiki uses now wasn't
chosen because it makes the programming simple--it was designed to make
things understandable/accessible to a wider group of users (PmWiki.Audiences).
Indeed, I knew at the time that I would eventually get some grief for
not going with a hierarchical scheme, but to me the simplicity of
a one-level group scheme outweighed the potential benefits of a
hierarchical approach.

So, in terms of what I want to accomplish-
  - the link/page reference syntax needs to be fairly easy to understand
  - authors should be able to create new "collections" (groups, subpages,
    classes, categories, whatever) of related pages
  - pages within a collection should be able to link to each other
    using simple wikiwords or free links (i.e., no path separators)
  - it should be easy to assign shared attributes such as passwords
    and permissions to all of the pages in the collection
  - collections should be customizable at the administrator (local/)
    and author (GroupHeader,GroupFooter) levels

A system with no groups makes it difficult to organize pages into 
collections.  A system with a purely hierarchical organization 
complicates the linking syntax (so far) and the ability to understand 
how attributes such as passwords and headers/footers are shared within
the (nested) collections.

Again, I'm only thinking about usability issues here.  From a programming/
technical perspective I think we could implement just about anything that
we come up with that is workable.

More next message.

Pm



More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list