[pmwiki-users] Wiki as PIM/Personal Notes tool

[Tegan Dowling]

On 9/11/06, Chris Lott <chris.lott at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am doing a workshop in a few weeks on using wikis (specifically
> PmWiki of course) as a PIM/personal notes tool. My target are faculty
> and staff who might be using tools like Evernote, OneNote, hundreds of
> notepad documents, sticky notes (real and virtual) etc. to manage
> "misc" information.
>
> I use PmWiki for this reason myself, but in a fairly vanilla way.
>
> Does anyone have tips, tricks, hints, particularly apt cookbook
> recipes, etc? I control the environment for these folks, so I can use
> whatever reciped make sense.
>
> I am going to talk about trails, page tocs, categories, page lists,
> sticky notes (using the postitnotes recipe), and WikiPublisher.

Possibly "New Page Box Plus" and/or "New Group Box"?

"New Page Box Plus" makes adding new pages very quick and easy. One of
the benefits of creating pages the "wiki way" - by linking to them
from an existing page - is that by linking to them in order to create
them, you minimize the number of orphaned pages on your site. If you
use a form to create new pages, the issue of orphaned pages can be
mitigated by building into a footer or sidebar a pagelist or dynamic
search, to list the pages in the group.

"New Group Box" has features that let you designate existing pages as
templates for the pages in your new group, and to optionally have the
wiki create and save the new, template-based pages in the new group
all at once.

I agree that it's wise to think about and discuss the architecture of
the wiki from the beginning.  Some users have trouble with the concept
of wikigroup.  I usually offer "mini-site" and "pagegroup" as
alternative terms.  "Mini-site" often helps, because it creates a
mental hook for the group-specific pages like homepage, sidebar,
groupheader, recentchanges, etc.

Still, some users create a all their pages in the same wikigroup, and
others seem to make every new page be the HomePage of a new wikigroup.