[pmwiki-users] Utility pages

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Wed Jun 15 11:20:05 CDT 2005


Jon hits most of the major issues I see squarely on the head...

On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 10:22:35AM -0500, Jon Haupt wrote:
>    [...lots of good stuff deleted...]
>    PmWikiAdmin always seemed like a good idea and the length really never
>    bothered me before because nobody visited those pages much, but like
>    Patrick said you'd suddenly be visiting it a lot if that's where
>    AllRecentChanges or SearchWiki was located.

Yes, PmWikiAdmin was fine for pages that we expected only wiki admins
to see, but once we start adding "SideBar", "SearchWiki", "AllRecentChanges",
etc. into the list then "PmWikiAdmin" doesn't seem to work so well.
It's not just length, but also how it will look to a typical reader when
encountered.  For example, if I use a template's search box to perform
a search on a site that otherwise doesn't act like a wiki, then it looks
really funny to have the search results page displaying "PmWikiAdmin"
in the url.  Not to mention that some wiki administrators will then
be concerned that ordinary users are somehow being exposed to the 
"admininstrative" sections of their site.

>    Perhaps Pm feels a little funny having Pm attached to odd words like Util
>    or Admin?  It's a little strange- sounds like the group is for Patrick
>    utilities :)

It's partially that, but it's also that many sites built on PmWiki 
often aren't looking to confront their audiences with the fact that
they're using PmWiki (or any sort of wiki, for that matter) -- they 
just want to put up a website with some search and link/navigation 
options.  They don't necessarily want the audiences to be seeing "Wiki",
"PmWiki", "PmWikiAdmin" or "PmSite" in urls, because the purpose of 
their site has little or nothing to do with wikis, PmWiki, or Pm.

Somehow, I just think that names like

  Site.AllRecentChanges         Site.ApprovedUrls         Site.SideBar
  Site.SearchWiki               Site.PageList             Site.Map

are so much more straightforward to a typical non-admin user than

  PmWikiAdmin.AllRecentChanges  PmWikiAdmin.ApprovedUrls  PmWikiAdmin.SideBar
  PmWikiAdmin.SearchWiki        PmWikiAdmin.PageList      PmWikiAdmin.Map

>    I think Site is probably the best option given that it is perhaps TOO
>    generic (even for the example I gave above) to be much of a useful group
>    otherwise.

Indeed, being overly generic was one factor that led me to choose 
"Main" in the first place; people don't like "Main" because it's too 
generic, but it turns out that the over-genericness of "Main" also meant 
that it wasn't likely to interfere with something that a site admin 
really wanted to use.  Or something like that. 

For those who are concerned that an admin might want to use
"Site" as a group name-- I'll pose the question:  How many existing 
sites are actually doing or considering this?  It's now worth noting 
that we have at least one example of a site that is using "Wiki" as a 
group name to hold pages about wikis (not about administration of
the wiki).  And yes, we also have a site that is using "Site" as a 
group name (Christian Ridderström's site(s)), but Christian has already 
indicated that he's using "Site" for the same reasons we're discussing,
so it's not really a conflict.  :-)

Pm



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