[pmwiki-users] Re: wiki calendar enhancements

John Rankin john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Wed May 25 16:38:53 CDT 2005


On Wednesday, 25 May 2005 11:32 PM, Nate Cull <nate at natecull.org> wrote:
>On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 00:08 +0200, malexism (f) wrote:
>> chr at home.se a écrit :
>> > That gave me an idea though... would it be useful to have a ready-made 
>> > template for when you create new days?
>> 
>> Yes, a template was a solution, but the best is a form.
>
>
>I have a similar situation, I am using PmWiki and WikiCalendar to run a
>community website. I want to make it as simple as possible to add
>information and would also like to enforce (as much as possible) a data
>schema.
>
>It strikes me that a really, really useful facility would be some kind
>of 'hard template' or form system - taking the idea of group templates
>and extending it into a generic form. So you could, eg, set up a form
>template for a 'person' record which has specified fields: Name, phone,
>email, address, etc. And when editing that page, you always only ever
>see the form fields, so the data you enter into that page is always in a
>valid and parseable format (XML or some similar ASCII-based syntax)
>which could then be pulled out by a script and put into a database - or
>queried directly by a web service API.
>
>At the moment I'm just using templates, as some of our data is more
>suited to a document than a database format, but I'd really like to have
>the ability to enforce a valid information schema onto a wiki-like
>system - so anyone could edit the *content* of a page, but not its
>*format*, guaranteeing it to be safely machine-parseable. That would be
>the best of the wiki and database worlds rolled into one very powerful
>product. 
>
>Given a generic 'form template' system, you could use that for many
>different purposes, and blog/agenda entries could be one of them... Mix
>that with a calendar engine and an ATOM API and we could take over the
>world. ;)
>
>
>It's probably a blue sky proposal at this stage, but it's not that far
>off from being doable as a Cookbook recipe, I think.  (Would need a bit
>of thought - would want, eg, separate 'edit' and 'display' templates, a
>template definition syntax, a syntax for storing the raw data, maybe the
>ability to have multiple records in one page or to add automatic
>backlinks to an index page when adding a new record... )
>
Have you looked at 
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/CompareFormsRecipes

And (*cough*) WikiForms may be a useful starting point for you.

Also, it is entirely practical to convert PmWiki markup to an xml
dtd other than xhtml. The PmWiki engine is (mostly) agnostic about
both input and output markups. So you can continue to store pages 
as wiki pages, then output them to a range of formats, depending 
on the purpose.



-- 
JR
--
John Rankin






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