[pmwiki-users] Re: Re: Re: Re: Supporting different modes in default pmwiki

[Bronwyn Boltwood]

On 8/7/05, Hans <design at flutesong.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
> Sunday, August 7, 2005, 10:36:34 PM, Bronwyn wrote:
> > Hans, the other day you wrote that you wanted standard wikipages for
> > action lists and other skin furniture.  This is just a different kind
> > of skin furniture, and standards will be equally beneficial.  Having a
> > standard set of modes gives both users and skin authors a baseline for
> > what modes are most important and what kinds of features they need.
> > It is then up to the skin authors to choose what modes they'll support
> > in a skin, or even create new modes.
> 
> I would like to support some standard for skin config pages for action
> lists, what you call skin furniture, so it may be used by different
> skins. If indeed we create a set of modes which can be applied across
> skin it will be good to agree on certain standards of what each mode
> should contain, as a minimum.

Exactly. Once the PmWiki skin began using a certain page to hold
sidebar content, both editable sidebars and certain pagenames for them
became standard.  There are very few skins that deviate from this
standard.

There can also be recommendations (vs. requirements) for what to
include, and I expect that the bar would gradually rise.

We also might learn what are the most common patterns for grouping
controls, and that would be a big step forward in the quest to have
standard pages for action lists.

> So we could write a set of standard menu pages for page actions,
> links, navigation etc, breaking these into divisions for the various
> modes, supported by css classes for better visual display.
> Okay, I think I can follow that. I support introducing an (:if mode
> ..:) conditional markup and a general $Mode variable.

Cool.  Glad to have you aboard! ;)

> Modelling it on Author it could be:
> 
> ##(:if mode conditional markup:
> $Conditions['mode'] = "\$GLOBALS['mode']==\$condparm";
> 
> with a global array variable $Mode.
> 
> This could be set with a cookie by ?setmode=....
> and without a cookie by ?mode=....
> 
> Candidates for $Mode are so far:
> $Mode = array('stealth', 'standard', 'author', 'admin');
> 
> Possible confusion over the terms author and admin,
> since author is a name of a variable and admin a keyword in
> DefaultPasswords.
> Can we come up with unique names for these modes?

The two obvious alternatives for author are editor and contributor. 
Nothing jumps to mind for admin, so maybe just enlarging it -- e.g.
wikiadmin or pmadmin.  Let's see what happens with a different part of
speech:
- reading / visiting
- editing / contributing
- running / administering / mastering / controlling / maintaining
- stealth (this one doesn't get an -ing because it's the wiki that's
being stealthy, not the user)

Do any of these choices reduce the chance of confusion?

Bronwyn