Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: OpenACS Wiki

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14: Re: OpenACS Wiki (response to 1)
Posted by hafeez bana on
Hi all,

Here are the comments I sent to davb when I ported wiki to ETP.

Current issues.
* URLs of the with / are not supported in wiki.
* etp::get_pa - modification is not clean. See comments in file.
* the interface doesn't flow. Maybe its because I am used to the old system
* I have no idea what subtopics, extlinks and symlinks are.
* the wiki templates are very rudimentary.

Pluses
* ETP design is very good. I have never worked with the openacs 4.x series and a port this far in
is a testament to the design
* permissioning. I always had granular permissions in mind for wiki. Now they come built in!
* versioning and content management - again very nice design of etp and the content system. So much code got delegated from the actual wiki app.

Personally it is VERY tempting to write things from scratch. (maybe its a psychological thing) and I do it quite frequently.

However with ETP Wiki I put my desire for a complete re-write on hold and was shocked by the time it took to port. The fundamentals of ETP are quite sound. I would not recomend another port. Especially since davb is handling the issues.

Some interesting things would be:

1) Wiki Input Widget - can be used in various parts of the site e.g bboard input, wiki syntax is way easier to learn, way easier to type and way easier to read even in raw wiki form.  I designed the original wiki to encourage better documentation at my previous office. I was pleasantly surprised.

2) Diffs rather then complete documents for various revisions - Both the original wiki and current ETP wiki store complete document revisions. They also display complete document revisions. It is HARD to tell what has changed, especially for large documents. There are two possibilities.

a) Store diffs in the cr.
b) DISPLAY diffs when browsing revisions. This allows the use of command line tools (maybe there is a tcl api for generating diffs).

I would go with b) - easier to integrate with existing tools, and doesnt bastardize the CR model.

3)Support for images and multimedia content - currently etp handles images by allowing you to place a link to an image. Upload of the image is your concern. A better design would step you through and collect this information for upload.

Regards,
Hafeez