[pmwiki-users] Blog proposal

[Bronwyn Boltwood]

On 1/11/06, Hans <design at softflow.co.uk> wrote:
> it would be better as I outlined to have a pmwiki core method to
> enable creation of trail pages which get populated automatically.
> trail markup does not work if it refers to a trail page which consists
> of a pagelist markup. We need a list of actual written links.
>
> This is what I am suggesting and looking forward to. With such a tool
> it would be a big step forward for a blogging solution.
> We got now page variables and pagelist with extra power, and
> newpagebox can be used to add blog pages easily. But auto-populating
> trail pages would be the best, even though most of it can be done with
> pagelist markup, and more can be done with pagelist markup if it
> includes an option to filter for date1..date2 intervals.

The blog engine's job is to do the grunt work of making the lists, so
that the blogger doesn't have to.  Archives should be accessible by
their various metadata facets, such as:
- post creation date
- categories and/or tags (PmWiki's category system does both at the same time)
- post author

Another very important function is to provide feeds:
- all posts
- posts by category/tag
- posts by author
- comments
- asides, or link posts -- where all you post is a link and a short description.

If the archives (date, category, author) are done as trails, then we
get most of the feeds for free.  An asides feed can be done by making
asides into a category.  But I'm not sure how a comments feed should
be done, because I don't know how comments are going to be done.

> proposal I would think it will be rather limited. I would prefer good
> core tools, and let recipe writers and skin designers use them to
> create various pmwiki blogging solutions. There is so much scope for
> variation and customisation.

I've been looking at WordPress recently, because I want to create a
couple of blogs soon, and PmWiki can't do it to my satisfaction yet. 
After having looked through themes and plugins and read over a lot of
the "how to customize your _____" material, I can witness that
customization is a big deal.  I can also tell you what an awful lot of
that customization is aimed at.  Leaving out pure graphic prettiness,
people want to customize what metadata is displayed, where, and how --
in a certain format, under a certain condition.  They also want to
collect and display additional, custom metadata, like location, or
mood, or what books they're reading, or what music they're listening
to.

There's other things they like to customize too, but an immense amount
of it is about metadata.  So PmWiki ought to be very flexible and
supportive in collecting, displaying, and formatting metadata.  For
example, I should be able to create an archive listing that organizes
posts by how many comments they have.  Or a recipe for archives
organized by location -- the post list could be done several ways,
e.g. by placename, latitude/longitude, GPS coordinates -- complete
with a map that has a dot for each post, or dots sized by frequency of
posts, so that visitors can see the trends.

Bronwyn