[pmwiki-users] Any hope for 2.2.0 stable release?

Petko Yotov 5ko at 5ko.fr
Wed Jan 14 17:37:55 CST 2009


On Wednesday 14 January 2009 20:02:46 Henrik Bechmann wrote:
> FWIW, if there was to be the formation of development team, I think it
> would be worth considering going (more or less directly) to version 3,
> being a migration to PHP5 and OOP.

* I have my PmWikis running on PHP5 since 2005. The current stable and beta 
work extremely fine with PHP5.

* OOP is not a goal in itself, but a means to some goal, and it is only worth 
the effort in some cases. See "OOP Myths Debunked" at 
http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/oopbad.htm .

PmWiki uses an OOP PageStore class that allows excellent integration of 
different storage mechanisms such as a database instead of or in addition to 
the filesystem, or a different filesystem configuration. Almost every other 
aspect of PmWiki can be configured via enabling a variable and providing a 
replacement function, without modifying core files. Every core script, should 
it be changed, may be placed in the /cookbook/ directory and be included 
instead of the original one. 

Is there a problem I cannot see, that requires migration to OOP?

> My three main feature requests: resource file management, an
> administrative interface, and a form-based content entry option.

* What is resource file management?
  - Deleting attachments is possible wia recipes : Cookbook:Attachtable
    and others
  - Uploading CSS files or whole skins via PmWiki's ?action=upload can be
    made possible by adding two lines of code to farmconfig.php.

* A recipe could be written to add an administrative interface. It may already 
exist. I have used myself for months a small snippet and I'll soon release it 
on the cookbook. It allows some selected config variables to be overridden by 
editing special wiki pages. Not form-based but does the job.

* There are more than one recipes for form-based content entry. One is PmForm 
by Pm, other is Fox by HansB, a third, new one, is Blogger by DaveG.

There is also another wiki project inspired by PmWiki and ZAP, which I believe 
has more form-based administration options. See http://www.boltwire.com/ .

Personally, I believe adding more features like these should be in recipes and 
not in the core. For the core, we should follow the PmWiki Philosophy.

> I think that the combination of targets such as these could take PmWiki
> back from being a laggard, to leapfrogging to the head of the line.

PmWiki is not laggard. I have not seen any other wiki that allows even half of 
the features PmWiki could plug-in, without the need to modify core files and 
potential problems on upgrades. Some core features like PageLists and 
PageTextVariables are quite unique in the wiki-world. The built-in search 
engine is better than any other wiki, with the best ratio performance vs 
CPU+fsystem usage.

The only thing I believe would be better, is to enable UTF-8 support in the 
default installation, but currently it is difficult for the script to know 
whether the wiki uses or not a custom character encoding, so an existing wiki 
that upgrades could occasionally break. We'll figure something out.

Thanks,
Petko



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