[Pmwiki-users] Re: Making a difference ... blue sky stuff.

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Tue Feb 3 13:59:13 CST 2004


On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 11:46:48AM -0600, John Feezell wrote:
> Second, it appears to me that many of the suggestions for changes, from 
> the user-list, center around replicating features available in other 
> wikis.  Many of these are excellent ideas but they don't represent "new" 
> concepts in the wikiworld.

Agreed, and beyond that it's never been a goal of mine to simply duplicate
the features that other wikis have or to try to build the largest feature
list.  I generally want to know how a feature is actually going to be 
used/useful before I increase the code complexity to accommodate it.

> I use PmWiki in a university teaching environment as a collaborative tool 
> to stimulate student interaction.  I also us PmWiki to support 
> environments for a number of different associations. Given the new 
> "author" feature, it would be helpful to me to be able to process the 
> diffs on a page and extract all "post" by "author" and receive as output a 
> page, sorted by "author", containing each persons contribution.  
> (I don't believe that this kind of output is available currently in 
> any wiki.)  

Indeed, I haven't seen anything like this either, but it sounds really
useful.  The university I've been at is also using PmWiki for
student interaction, and they could also use a feature like you've
described.

Fortunately, I think PmWiki's structure would make this relatively
easy to implement.  The difficult part is knowing what the output
should look like, and what sorts of selection/sort criteria you'd
want.  Do you want to look at diffs for the entire site, a set of
groups, a single group, or just one page?  Do you want to restrict 
the view to diffs within a particular time range?  I can probably
put together a rough working script for this in a day or so.

> Once 0.6 is stable, I plan to work on a script this idea. But why not 
> include a way to collect the "author's" email address so that I could 
> follow-up with an email response to a "post"?  Hopefully you get the idea.

Well, part of the reason I'm wanting to have a standard group
for author pages is that it becomes the obvious place to store
author profile information, such as email address, site/user 
preferences, etc. (including, I suppose, author authentication).

Along this lines, another choice for the author group name would
be "Profiles", as in "Profiles/Pm".

> Here's my question:
>   Are there "new" features/techniques, not available in other wikis, that 
> could be implemented in PmWik that would encourage collaborative work between 
> "users" and at the same time cause PmWiki to standout from all other wikis?

Pardon my arrogance/conceit, but I think PmWiki already stands out from 
the other wikis.  :-P  :-)  

But yes, I'm interested in getting PmWiki to be better known in its
market context, which I see as being slightly different from the 
traditional wiki engines.  PmWiki has always been focused on (1) making 
it easier for people to collaboratively build and work together in 
web spaces, and also (2) providing a platform that makes it easier for 
others to prototype, build, and experiment with new features/techniques 
for collaboration.  Thus the PmWiki Cookbook.  So, like you, I'm eager
to hear any ideas people may have about new things we could be doing
in this area.

Pm



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