[pmwiki-users] Some feedback/remarks/comments about pmwiki ...

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 02:50:22PM +0100, WvL wrote:
>   What - in my concerns - could be improved:
>   - There is NO Group nesting,
>     at least i practically would need a nesting-depth of 
>     additionally 3 Subgroups

I'm assuming you've already read 
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/HierarchicalGroups which explains
why PmWiki doesn't have group nesting.  It essentially comes down to
figuring out how to handle page links between nested groups; if
someone can figure out an obvious, intuitive way for authors to
do that, then nested groups becomes plausible.

>     (imagine your filesystem on your pc would be restricted to creating just root-level directories
>      this would lead to limit the REAL structure of your contents
>      and to a error-prone handling of your "flattened" datafiles ...)

The difference between a filesystem and pagespace is that a directory
has no content of its own other than the files it contains, while
in a wiki we would expect to be able to have a page at both
Animal.Mammal and Animal.Mammal.Canine  (i.e., "Animal.Mammal" refers
to both a group and a page).

>   - Missing information-separation between the different audiences, i.e.
>     (readers; writers/authors; administrators; developers/contributors
>      - novice/beginners; advanced; at expert level)

http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/Audiences is supposed to cover that.
Is it insufficient?  What's missing?

>   - Depending on this, each newcomer has the same concerns
>     - Where do i find the needed information?
>        (there are too much info-sources ...
>         Documentation index, Cookbook/Recipes (with mostly several alternatives there),
>         FAQ, Questions, mailing list, mailing list archives ...)

It's difficult to distill a package as powerful as PmWiki into 
a concise set of documentation that meets everyone's needs --
and in many ways we're just now beginning to identify the
underlying organizational principles that can make the
documentation work.  So, it just takes time.  Everyone is of
course welcome to take information from the mailing list and
add to the documentation or cookbook on pmwiki.org.

> At last, some various, more PRACTICAL CONCERNS:
> - Internationalisation (i restrict here to german):
>   How to synchronize between the standard (english) Documentation
>   and the german docu. ?
>   If changes are made to the standard, how to "trigger" the need for a change to the german docu.
>   so that in turn it is always 'up-to-date' ?

I don't have a good answer for this one.

> - Effect of: Disabling/recommenting $EnableUpload = 1;
>   This "disables" not only the ability to uploading in general,
>   but "disables" rendering of all so far uploaded images
>   (showing the textual markup-code instead)
>   - is it the desired semantics of this directive?

Yes, this is the desired semantics of the directive.  If one
wants to leave uploading in place, but to prevent others from uploading,
use upload passwords or disable ?action=upload:

    $DefaultPasswords['upload'] = '*';     # lock uploads via password

    $HandleAuth['upload'] = 'admin';       # only admins can upload

> I managed to establish a first installation so far.
> My next concerns/topics were
> - HOWTO: extend each page with a Wikipedia-like 
>   "discussion"-/feature/tab/page  (i use the monobook-skin)?

This is http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/00045, which I'm hoping to
add as part of PmWiki's blogging capabilities.

> - HOWTO: handy organize/access Photo-Album(-Upload)s?
>   intended structure, e.g.: <user>.Photos.<year>.<albumname, e.g.="Halloween">/DSC_xxxx.JPG
>   with multiple-selection upload-feature
>   (well, i see there are cookbook-recipes, but which should i take/extend?
>    Simply: what's recommended?)

"What's recommended" would undoubtedly depend on who is doing
the recommending.  :-)  I don't know that we have a recommendations
section; there was some discussion last week about having a way to
rate cookbook recipes, but my impression was that the group here
decided it wouldn't be all that workable or useful.  (See the thread
starting around
http://www.pmichaud.com/pipermail/pmwiki-users/2006-March/024248.html .)

I skipped over a couple of your items due to time constraints --
we can bring them up again later.

Thanks!

Pm