[pmwiki-users] PmWiki for a Writer? (Long)

[ABClf]

It is important you decide first about what structure you will adopt
for storing your data.
PmWiki uses Group/Name structure ; you can easily extand with suffix
Group/Name-Discussion (easy for targeting pages according to their
names/functions).
Other tools to know : PmWiki has very nice native pagelisting ability,
making it able to collect data in your wiki, with many parameters and
formatting options (tables, list, includes, up to you).
PmWiki has also great support for PTV and includes.

Have a look at other bible/database projects made using pmwiki to see
how they are done if you like them (try ?action=source to see if
source is accessible); it's going to take a day or more to browse the
links (success story page will be of help, although not updated
enough).

These examples may be worth visiting, at least for watching their structure :
http://www.trainsofturkey.com/w/pmwiki.php/Site/About
http://classic-sf.com/
http://www.swcity.net/pmwiki/pmwiki.php
http://becko.tabletop-minis.de/

Having multiple groups for multiple series makes sense (to my mind,
what is important is to make things easy to target searches and
pagelist and rss, and be short enough to write links fast) ; and use
other category-like groups for collecting transversal data (Year,
Location, Character, etc.), using GroupFooter and GroupHeader to
automate the page listings.
There is no one solution only. You have to brainstorm.

A floating box, with structured data, should be easy to do. I guess
its mainly a css work for the layout. You might use PTV there, thus
you will be able to show panoramic pages with data collected among a
set of pages, or set up a targeted search engine.

My advice : check what others have done. Read doc about group,
category, page variable, ptv, and pagelist. When its done, install and
play with pmwiki. Create two groups, write a set of pages, with links,
anchors, and ptv ; set up pagelists in transversal pages. It is a
handy and nice tool, very powerfull and flexible, easy to upgrade,
easy to backup.

You have data ready so you can start playing soon, but you will have
to do some rewriting work for using your data with PmWiki (write
links, headers, anchors, ptv data, all things you will be able to use
as selectors in pagelists).

No matter what tool you will use for your project, you will have to
learn how to use it first, and how to format your data for enjoying
the tool you use at his best ;)

Gilles.

2015-09-19 6:57 GMT+02:00 Bob Mueller <bobmueller at ravensbeak.com>:
> Greetings all. I've got some feasibility and strategic questions about using
> PmWiki.
>
> I'm looking to use a wiki for a series bible. That's where you keep all of
> your information about characters and settings and locations across a
> series. I've been using Word docs and Excel spreadsheets, but that's a
> kludgy approach, and won't scale well, I think. Wikis are perfect for the
> idea, and I think PmWiki will be just what I want.
>
> I'll be the only user and admin for the foreseeable future. I have my own
> domain and a good web host.
>
> I have two book series that I want to use this for. Series1 has 2 books
> done, and a 3d in progress. Series2 has 6-7 books planned.
>
> I want the sections for the unwritten or in-progress books to stay private
> until the books are published. Then I'll open them up for public viewing
> (but almost certainly not editing) as each book is published.
>
> So am I talking about multiple groups here? I think I am, based on the
> documentation I've read.
>
> If I set up a Series1 group, can I also set up Book1, Book2, and Book3
> subgroups? And for MainCharacter, I don't have to replicate his page across
> all three subgroups, right?
>
> But is this (all these subgroups) really the best way to handle it? Os is
> there something a little bit more elegant?
>
> Lastly (for now), if I want to make my character pages look almost exactly
> like https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jack_Ryan_(character) for
> example, how difficult is it to set up what Wikipedia calls an infobox on
> the right side like that? I wasn't sure that Wikipedia and PmWiki use the
> same term for that construct, and I don't think I was finding what I needed
> in the docs or the Cookbook.
>
> Thanks much for any help here.
>
> --
> Bob Mueller
> The Sad Girl - now available at Amazon
> Don't Stop Believin' - Fall 2015
> http://bit.ly/IndefixaBooks
>
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