[pmwiki-users] The Philosophy of PmWiki: adding to the core

[Simon]

I'm soliciting some discussion from the PmWiki community on the approach to
having features and functionality added to the PmWiki
core<http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Category/CoreCandidate>
.

There are a number of PITS <http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/PITS>entries
that request modest enhancements to PmWiki, most of which would benefit
writers <http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/PmWikiPhilosophy> and
administrators, that are not being added to the core

Is this because there is a desire to avoid creeping "featureitis",
or because there is not the capacity to do these changes, awaiting
feedback<http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/AwaitingFeedback>,
suspended <http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/PITS#Suspended>, or some other
reason.

Often a suggestion is made to add these as a recipe or configuration item
in config.php.

My concern is that if PmWiki is 'all recipes' and 'no improvements' it
leads to a 'balkanisation' by recipe of PmWiki (and some recipes themselves
are balkanised - which to use?), that is to say that while my wiki(s) might
use a number of these great recipes, other don't, and writers can't reply
on the same markup or features across different PmWikis. Consistency and
completeness (orthogonality) have a place.

Now personally I don't use C2 wiki, or Usemod engines, because they don't
have 'enough' features. PmWiki fits for me in the sweet spot, good
features, easy to install, extremely responsive developers, doesn't try to
be to much or all things to all people.

But I'd like to see the core PmWiki improving too.

As an administrator of several wikis I'd like to see more 'out of the box',
We don't have any way of installing recipes automatically (think app
store), so both an ongoing maintenance effort is required and quite some
knowledge of Pmwiki is required to carry out such customisations and recipe
installs.

over to you

Simon
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.pmichaud.com/pipermail/pmwiki-users/attachments/20131103/fc19f491/attachment.html>