[pmwiki-users] Newbie Alert!!! - Simple Database?

Peter & Melodye Bowers pbowers at pobox.com
Sat Oct 27 11:44:44 CDT 2007


I'm just getting started with forms/pseudo-database in pmwiki.  I first
played around with some approaches in fox and then moved to zap.  I wasn't
getting the form approach and flexibility I was looking for (I didn't spend
much time, so if there is greater capability there than I found the problem
is with me, not with the recipes).  Also I found a great deal of discussion
regarding Zap with the end result being that apparently zap is no longer
being actively updated on pmwiki.  (If I have misinterpreted, my apologies
-- I'm just going on my skim-throughs of old posts on this group.)
Obviously that's a pretty key point if you're planning on taking this into
the future.

I ended up on WikiForms and was pleasantly surprised at how easily it went
in and how much power was present with almost no effort at all on my part.
In a recent post JR said it had been a "quickie" intended for a single
application, but it's obviously been well designed and has great potential
and easily enough of that potential has already been implemented for it to
be a highly useful tool.

Feel free to check out http://www.ccl-al.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=X.X and the
pages in that same group if you want to see another example of a site making
use of it.

A few points I've found to beware of:
* avoid any characters other than lower-case letters in your variable names.
* avoid colons in your help text
* plan your FormTemplate carefully -- you can't re-order fields or insert
fields in the middle of your form without going back and re-editing all your
data forms again.
* there is no good way to format the form other than a vertical list of
fields -- there are some feature requests out there, but nothing implemented
(that I can find) at this point
* documentation is a little difficult to read, but that's my fault as much
as anybody's since it's in a wiki format...

Hope that helps in some small way.  Also I hope you see that this small list
of concerns is by no means saying the recipe is lacking -- I am a
wholehearted wikiforms convert...

-Peter

> -----Original Message-----
> From: pmwiki-users-bounces at pmichaud.com [mailto:pmwiki-users-
> bounces at pmichaud.com] On Behalf Of Jeff Schallenberg
> Sent: Saturday, October 27, 2007 2:55 PM
> To: PmWiki Users
> Subject: [pmwiki-users] Newbie Alert!!! - Simple Database?
> 
> I am just getting my feet wet with PmWiki, and I would like to create
> a simple inventory database for our organization.
> 
> I am used to the "tracker" function in TikiWiki, which allowed one to
> define fields and their data types in a flat database.
> 
> I have read a bit about Forms in PmWiki, but I have not seen any
> examples or recipes that are like what I would call a database.
> 
> Do you have any suggestions how to proceed, or any example wikis with
> something like a database? A simple contact list or even a todo list
> would be useful for me to study.
> 
> - Jeff
> 
> --
> - Jeff
> 
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