[pmwiki-devel] recipe configuration screens: best practice?

[ben at interdependentweb.com]

Hello again, folks.  Development of DataQuery is going slower than I  
had hoped.  Since I'm not forging ahead anyway, I thought I'd take the  
opportunity to get some feedback...

Configuration of queries is looking complex enough that if it were  
done through a variable in the config.php, the array would be at least  
3 dimensions deep, which is intimidating for novice admins.  So I'm  
thinking of making a configuration screen for each query at  
DataQuery.QueryName ... since DataQuery.DataQuery is already the  
status screen, admins could just make the whole DataQuery group  
require an admin password to lock it down.

My question is how to best save the configuration info in a wiki page.  
  I'm thinking of having a custom edit form that saves each field  
separately in a wiki page, rather than lumping all the fields together  
into the text= field.  That would make them easier for me to access  
within the recipe, since I'd just have to ReadPage($pagename) into an  
array and maybe do a little processing to restore the dimensions of  
the array to their proper depth.  The downside is that the history  
feature wouldn't work -- you couldn't restore previous revisions of  
the query.

So... is it better to go down the path of ZAPdata and save all the  
info as page text variables within the text= field?  Or is there a  
better way I should consider?

Thanks in advance!  --Ben S.