[pmwiki-users] Re: wiki calendar enhancements

Nate Cull nate at natecull.org
Wed May 25 06:32:55 CDT 2005


On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 00:08 +0200, malexism (f) wrote:
> chr at home.se a écrit :
> > That gave me an idea though... would it be useful to have a ready-made 
> > template for when you create new days?
> 
> Yes, a template was a solution, but the best is a form.


I have a similar situation, I am using PmWiki and WikiCalendar to run a
community website. I want to make it as simple as possible to add
information and would also like to enforce (as much as possible) a data
schema.

It strikes me that a really, really useful facility would be some kind
of 'hard template' or form system - taking the idea of group templates
and extending it into a generic form. So you could, eg, set up a form
template for a 'person' record which has specified fields: Name, phone,
email, address, etc. And when editing that page, you always only ever
see the form fields, so the data you enter into that page is always in a
valid and parseable format (XML or some similar ASCII-based syntax)
which could then be pulled out by a script and put into a database - or
queried directly by a web service API.

At the moment I'm just using templates, as some of our data is more
suited to a document than a database format, but I'd really like to have
the ability to enforce a valid information schema onto a wiki-like
system - so anyone could edit the *content* of a page, but not its
*format*, guaranteeing it to be safely machine-parseable. That would be
the best of the wiki and database worlds rolled into one very powerful
product. 

Given a generic 'form template' system, you could use that for many
different purposes, and blog/agenda entries could be one of them... Mix
that with a calendar engine and an ATOM API and we could take over the
world. ;)


It's probably a blue sky proposal at this stage, but it's not that far
off from being doable as a Cookbook recipe, I think.  (Would need a bit
of thought - would want, eg, separate 'edit' and 'display' templates, a
template definition syntax, a syntax for storing the raw data, maybe the
ability to have multiple records in one page or to add automatic
backlinks to an index page when adding a new record... )






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