[pmwiki-users] Looking for suggestions for neighborhood site

Tegan Dowling tmdowling at gmail.com
Mon Jun 15 09:21:05 CDT 2009


On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 1:32 AM, kjettil <kjettil at wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> David Spitzley wrote:
> > Ideally I want to allow separate logins per business or other
> organization, with separate pages for each, each of them individually
> stylable.  I'm half considering rolling my own, but I'd like hear any
> suggestions others may have of either specific configurations of pmwiki
> (I've done about 6 installs for different purposes, but nothing too
> different from a standard wiki), or of other software which would support
> such a project effectively.
> >
> <Snip> All sites work like charm, except ...
>
> ... except  for sites with  "novice" users, where PmWiki's lack of
> WYSIWYG editing is an effective barrier to user participation. Most
> people simply don't want to take the time to learn wiki "coding". And if
> they try, they often get things wrong, end up with an ugly looking page
> and never try again. In one case, a club site where club members were
> supposed to contribute text and images, we had to scrap the PmWiki site
> entirely and instead use WordPress. That reduced the number of degrees
> of freedom in web design but solved the problem with user participation.


That's my experience, too -- unless I have a good relationship with a very
capable representative of the users' group, and together we're prepared to
watch the site like hawks and jump in helpfully the moment a user has
trouble (*after* conducting group and one-on-one training sessions that
communicate, above all, the availability of help when it's needed), you'll
get users giving up in disgust.

Most of my wikis have very few users, and I work with them to get them
comfortable with the wiki markup.

You might look at something like a "roll your own" social network -- e.g.
ning.com.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.pmichaud.com/pipermail/pmwiki-users/attachments/20090615/a567c9f1/attachment.html 


More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list