[Pmwiki-users] developers history

[John Rankin]

On Wednesday, 12 May 2004 6:56 AM, Jonathan Scott Duff <duff at pobox.com> wrote:
>On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 04:55:58AM +0100, J. Meijer wrote:
>> It would be nice to hear a little recap of the pmwiki history as it
>> developed from a personal point of view. There are probably a lot of new
>> pmwiki users/developers listening here. From the change log it is apparent
>> that John Rankin and Scott Duff were there from the beginning. How did the
>> group integrate?
>
[snip]
>John Rankin was, I think, the first
>"outsider" to use pmwiki and he had lots of design ideas. Pm basically
>did (does) all of the development while the rest of us just provided
>ideas and feedback, etc.
>
I came across it by accident (as you do) around September 2002. IIRC my
web browser (iCab) was reporting an error in how pmwiki translated 
'''''bold and italic''''' markup and I posted a small note on the bugs 
page, with some fix options. This was my first experience of Pm's fast 
response to problems.

My company deals a lot with government clients and they often raise the
issue of how you get support for open source software (what one might call
the "whom do I sue if this doesn't work?" question). I tell them about 
the time when we reported one bug and Pm replied 12 minutes later that he
had confirmed and incorporated the fix at the last minute and we should
download and install the latest version. Sometimes we can then have a 
discussion about 'open source' covering such a broad spectrum of offerings 
that it's maybe not helpful to make generalisations and one needs to
consider each case on its merits.

We have done much local customisation to make it easier for non-technical 
people to use it like a word processor. The first use was to convert the 
proposed Rules for the New Zealand Electrocity Market from M$ Word to wiki 
for use on an intranet, where all the internal policy and procedure 
documents could be cross-referenced to the relevant Rule. Out of this came 
wiki trails and free links (which I originally wrote as a local 
customisation -- and encountered for the first time the challenge when a 
local customisation makes it into the core, only a bit different and 
better, thereby breaking the local version).

Probably the biggest and most extensively customised implementation is at
http://tertiary.customer.onesquared.net/index.php/TiWiki/TiWiki
(They haven't decided on an address yet.) The big customisations are:
- a trail page can have a Publish button to format the page collection 
  into printable form
- all printable views carry a pdf icon; click the icon and it reformats 
  the page using LaTeX, and can include a title and contents pages, and so
  on; the developer commented that because PmWiki produces clean and 
  consistent HTML, it's relatively easy to convert the HTML markup into 
  LaTeX markup
- it uses a wiki farm -- collections of groups with a common purpose 
  clustered round the central core
- [[toc ...]] markup, developed and tested in collaboration with 
  Christian Ridderstr?m, for generating page table of contents links

The users tell me that the little customisations they like best are:
- ?DefinedTerm and {{?Term}} link you to a shared glossary of terms group
- if a page starts with a heading (!... markup), the text appears as a 
  tool tip on references to that page

So for us, the ability to add local customisations without touching 
the core software is very important. And I like the philosophy. Not 
having a comp-sci background, I like being able to get stuff done,
even though much of the discussion on this list is quite beyond me.

Kind regards and I hope this wasn't too long and boring.

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin