[pmwiki-users] on over-bundling

[Neil Herber]

At 2005-03-08  09:51 PM -0500, Radu is rumored to have said:
>Q: how can we keep pmwiki as effective for each application as possible?
>
>A1: bundle lots of features in one distribution
>A2: continue the current patchwork of individual recipes and skins
>A3: create use-niche trails (see discussion below)
>A4: ....
>....

I tried about 6 different wikis before settling on PmWiki as the one I 
would use. That decision was based on several factors:

1) Relatively stable code base with a small footprint
2) All the features I needed and not too many more
3) Dead-simple farm configuration (well, it looks simple now, but it had me 
confused for many days)
4) Superb mailing list support

I can't see any need for PmWiki to have a massive number of features in the 
main distribution. I think it should be as lean as possible while providing 
the majority of the services that people consider essential. Picking and 
choosing those features is a delicate task, and Patrick makes it look much 
easier than it really is.

I agree that the documentation could be improved (especially for newbies), 
but show me any documentation where that isn't true and I'll eat a small 
bit of it. The best way for the needed improvements to take place are for 
people (newbies especially!!) to go to the pages causing confusion and 
plunk your question/confusion right there. Send a message to the mailing 
list that says "I am confused by xxx and I posted my questions about it on 
this page : http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/yyyyy, can anyone help?". If the 
solution gets posted on the page, or if the page gets rewritten to remove 
the confusion, we all gain.

Part of the problem with the docs is that they are too "flat". I would like 
to see more aggregator pages discussing particular topics (say, passwords) 
and then referencing all the relevant pages. As Jonathan Scott Duff 
suggested, the category feature could be used to good effect here. The only 
problem that presents to me, is that I still can't get my head around how 
categories work.

So my bottom line vote is keep PmWiki lean, promote cookbook entries, and 
improve the docs. Meanwhile, I'll try to learn how to use categories.


Neil

Neil Herber
Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/
Eton Systems, 15 Pinepoint Drive, Nepean, ON, Canada K2H 6B1
Tel: (613) 829-4668