[Pmwiki-users] Author tracking questions

[Patrick R. Michaud]

I finally have some author tracking integrated into PmWiki; you can
try it out at http://www.pmichaud.com/work/beta/pmwiki.php.  

In keeping with my standard development practice, I've gone for a
simple but flexible implementation for the time being and will integrate 
important features as they are identified.  Thus, the current version 
simply provides a box in the edit form where a person can enter his/her
name, and it stores the author information with each revision
of each page.  It also saves the author name in a cookie on the user's
browser for thirty days (configurable).

A few questions for the group:

* What should be the limitations on author names?  So far I think
  that at minimum we can allow letters, digits, hyphens, spaces, and
  underscores--basically the same as a freelink.  Is there anyone
  that feels that limiting author names to this set is too restrictive?
  Do we need to allow other characters such as periods and commas?

* What other items besides page revisions need to track/list authorships?

* What other author-related features should PmWiki support?  If author
  names can be easily translated into FreeLinks then PmWiki could
  automatically generate links to user pages (e.g., in a 'Users' WikiGroup).

Note that I'm *not* planning to add author-based access controls anytime
soon (although it ought to be possible to add a custom module for this), 
and I'm postponing the issue of author authentication (i.e., verifying the
identity of the author name) for the time being unless there are a 
lot of people who think it's really important.

Comments, suggestions greatly welcomed.  

Pm