[pmwiki-users] The Philosophy of PmWiki: adding to the core

[Eric Forgeot]

On 03/11/2013 22:54, Tamara Temple wrote:
> I’d like to see the core improving, and it does. /.../
>   Monolithism is rather awful to deal with on many systems. What I would love to see, though, is a package management system that makes installing and updating recipes and skins easier, and aids development of local and shared recipes and skins. This is rather ambitious, I know.
>

I agree. I like how pmwiki is customisable and hackable. It also seems 
very robust: some old cookbooks are still working, so we can understand 
pmwiki has a clean base and its modularism is working well.

A skin and management system would be cool. I think about dokuwiki which 
handles this well. Yet, after having used both pmwiki and dokuwiki, I 
still prefer pmwiki, I think it's because dokuwiki still looks too much 
like a classic wiki (think wikipedia) with widgets, options and such, 
even with some alternative skins.

On the other hand, there is something I like very much on dokuwiki, and 
find annoying on pmwiki: it's the way data are stored. I regret all 
history and metadata are kept in the same files in pmwiki, I also guess 
it might impact a bit the performance if it loads the whole data when 
reading the content of the files, but I may be wrong on this point.

I also regret line breaks and such are mangled in pmwiki, which means 
you can't easily edit your data from outside a web browser, for example 
I synchronize text files between a website and my android device, so I 
can edit my pages from a simple text editor (I'm using Lionwiki for this 
purpose, it's an other light wiki engine).

There is a receipe for this for pmwiki: 
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/PageTopStore but it doesn't work 
very well and I think it should be native in pmwiki and well supported.

Dokuwiki also support out of the box cached data. I haven't tried to 
achieve the same on pmwiki, but it looks complicated to set up (for 
example with http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/FastCache).

The default skin used on the PmWiki website should also be improved, I 
think it may prevent newcomers to choose PmWiki (it should at least use 
responsive web, and nicer colors and fonts)