[pmwiki-users] benefits of the Groups system

[Chris Cox]

christine the sprite wrote:
> Someone asked me about a week about whether i intended to use Groups to
> organize my wiki and i must confess that i'm a little unclear how it
> would benefit users to encourage them to use Groups for submitting new
> pages to the wiki.  I understand that from an organizational point of
> view it's always better to group things in like categories, i just don't
> understand what practical benefit or how it will make a difference to
> how people use a wiki.  I'm just worried that people will forget to put
> the group name in or will misspell it and so i need a good reason as to
> why users should bother in the first place.

Groups don't merely delineate content... Groups are used to
delineate behavior as well..

One type where this comes in handy are the calendar add-ons.
They work best inside of their own group.

At work, groups are used for the various disciplines inside
the company and each can theme their group without affecting
the others.

You can protect pages differently using groups (rather than
doing things page, by page, by page).  So groups are
useful for permission setting.

Personally I don't like wiki's where you navigate by
manually typing in the URL.  So for me, I setup the stubs
to get you to the groups so you don't have to worry so
much about forgetting to type in the group name.

Just my two cents (I couldn't live without groups).

(there's a million other reasons why groups are neat...
others may fill in the rest)

They are useful.. but obviously, you don't HAVE to use
them.