[pmwiki-users] Slender: prebundled wikis

The Editor editor at fast.st
Wed Jan 24 12:07:35 CST 2007


Been too busy lately to post anything on the slender proposal thread,
and it seems to have drifted a bit in focus in the meantime.  But I
did have a few thoughts to contribute...

1) I'm not too keen on the idea of developing divergent wiki markup
systems as it is only going to add some significant challenge to
providing support. There is an advantage to us sticking together--and
Pm invariably makes good decisions. The price of sticking together, of
course, is having to defer our personal preferences on occasion for
how core works. So far however, it's been a small price to pay for
some exceptional software.

Having said that, I still need to get around to deleting the custom
select markup I have in zap...  :)

2) As for the specific suggestions in the slender proposal of a
simplified markup that didn't involve leading spaces or requires \\
etc., I suspect the problem can be solved with a simple recipe or two.
 ZAP already has a command that does this quite nicely without making
any changes to the standard PmWiki markup or its rendering engine.  If
someone wanted just that function, it would be easy enough to strip
out the code and make it into a mini recipe. (Actually, it was about
the trickiest thing I did in the entire zap system!)

Of course, Pm or others could probably suggest a better solution, or
Pm might be able to offer a configuration option that eliminates the
need for \\.  (I'd love that!).  After all, an option for turning off
leading spaces looks as if it might be coming soon. So, rather than
fragment, my recommendation is we stick together and focus on making
PmWiki better?

3) Lastly, I should add I really do like the idea of developing
prebundled wikis and perhaps having a place to make them available as
a simple zip file or something. The ZAPtasks project and the ZAPnews
machine are two examples of quite complex wiki's involving specific
recipes, config.php settings, custom pagelists, groupheaders/formats,
skins, etc.  What took me 40 some hours to painstakingly craft could
be reproduced by someone else in about 2 minutes by downloading a
pre-bundled fully functional, easily modifiable wiki. You could even
add a help page or two with step by step configuration recommendations
for a new user, or tips on customization options.

But where do we offer that kind of thing?  I could put mine up on
zapsite, and may eventually, if there's any interest in these
projects, but others have probably also done complex projects that
could serve as a base others could use for rapid project development.
It would be great to have a central repository of such wiki's and keep
them updated etc., just like the scripts and skins are done currently.
 I suppose we could put them in the cookbook, but that is getting a
bit crowded already!

Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Dan




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