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16:57.23 | kencausey | AntiProxy: Hi |
16:57.29 | kencausey | oops, netsplit |
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18:32.32 | kencausey | pb_: Hmm, good idea, bad idea, I'm not sure. Adding the ability to append comments to static pages? AntiProxy? |
18:33.00 | kencausey | Maybe we just eliminate the wiki altogether. |
18:35.40 | pb_ | I think the wiki is valuable for more spontaneous stuff. |
18:35.56 | kencausey | True |
18:36.09 | pb_ | It's often very useful to have a place where you can put ad-hoc notes for whatever you happen to be working on at the time. |
18:36.36 | kencausey | What's the fundamental thing that makes it useful though? |
18:36.41 | kencausey | Web based editting? |
18:36.52 | kencausey | Structured Text? |
18:36.55 | pb_ | Yeah. I guess really it's having a kind of shared whiteboard that's valuable.# |
18:37.12 | kencausey | The question is could be replace the fundamental usefulness with something simpler and easier to manage. |
18:37.16 | kencausey | s/be/we/ |
18:37.54 | kencausey | Since people don't seem to mind signing up for accounts on the geeklog site, maybe we could go to a system where you have to have a geeklog account to create pages. |
18:38.05 | kencausey | s/create/create\/edit/ |
18:38.10 | pb_ | Yes, I think that'd be worthwhile. |
18:39.31 | kencausey | As much as I love Zope, having all these disparate systems seem to complicate things. |
18:44.10 | kencausey | I'm thinking people could add pages under their account (another menu item in User functions). They would end up with a URL like http://handhelds.org/<uw>/<username>/<page title> for their page where <uw> is whatever the URL is for the geeklog plugin. The page would not be linked to from anywhere except a directory that each user can see of his/her own pages. If they want to they can give the URL to anyone or link to it from anywhere. They can add it |
18:44.10 | kencausey | to the Web Resources. They can set each page to either be only edittable by the owner or edittable by any registered user (any admin can edit any page). |
18:45.12 | kencausey | Surely we can find some PHP structured text rendering code |
18:46.03 | pb_ | Surely. There might even be a php-based wiki implementation that we can borrow stuff from. Wiki seems to have been implemented in almost every conceivable way at some time or another. |
18:46.11 | kencausey | Right |
18:47.33 | kencausey | Management then of new pages could be eased by having a new line item under Admins Only that gives admins access to the newest created/modified pages for quick perusal. |
18:48.39 | pb_ | Maybe it'd be worth bringing this up on the admin@ list for wider comments. |
18:49.20 | kencausey | Yeah, I want to give it a little more thought, but I'm glad you consider it worth considering. |
18:49.37 | kencausey | I really would need to corral someone else like AntiProxy to at least help. |
18:50.10 | pb_ | Yep. I need to think about it some more myself. On the one hand I agree that the current wiki is hard to tame, but I am worried that we might be setting the barrier to entry so high that we will kill off some of the worthwhile stuff as well. |
18:50.43 | kencausey | Yes, that's the major issue. But I fear the wiki mangling is only going to increase over time. |
18:51.39 | kencausey | And creating a geeklog account (having an email address) really doesn't seem like much of a barrier. I think it's in everyone's interest to restrict page modifiction to those that are willing to put forth a little effort and be willing to identify themselves with the page. |
18:51.45 | pb_ | Yep. I think my favoured course at the moment would be to retain the basic idea of the wiki as we have it now (ie everybody can edit any page) but require you to be authenticated to geeklog before making any edits. |
18:52.45 | kencausey | Yes, the idea of restricting edits to the owner is only a minor issue. |
18:53.52 | pb_ | I don't have much of an idea how to tie wiki edit rights into geeklog's user system though, at a technical level. I guess geeklog must set a cookie on authenticated users, so we could maybe hack the wiki to require this. |
18:54.10 | kencausey | Huh? |
18:54.19 | kencausey | I don't see any reason to make use of the existing wiki at all |
18:54.37 | kencausey | There's whole gobs of functionality there that we have no use for. |
18:54.47 | kencausey | Just do this as a new geeklog plugin |
18:55.13 | pb_ | Mmm, yeah, maybe that's the thing to do. |
18:55.31 | pb_ | Does a geeklog plugin exist for that kind of thing, or would we need to develop one? |
18:55.44 | kencausey | No idea, but I'm assuming for now that we would have to develop it. |
18:55.49 | kencausey | But it doesn't seem that involved to me. |
18:56.15 | pb_ | No, indeed. In fact, calling it a "plugin" is a bit of an over-glamorisation. It's really just a piece of PHP that calls some functions provided by geeklog. |
18:56.38 | kencausey | History can simply be done by having each "page" be a directory, as new versions are created a new file is added into the directory and when rendered simply the newest one is picked. |
18:56.48 | kencausey | True |
18:56.53 | pb_ | Yep, that'd work. |
18:56.59 | kencausey | But being able to hook into the menus would be good. |
18:57.40 | kencausey | To revert to a previous version simply make a new copy of the older version. |
18:57.57 | pb_ | Right. Or we could use RCS for that. |
18:58.00 | kencausey | It wouldn't be hard then to automate pruning. |
18:58.13 | kencausey | yes, that would be more space efficient I suppose. |
18:58.25 | pb_ | One feature I've often missed from the current wiki is "show me what changed in the last <n> versions of this page". |
18:58.33 | kencausey | diff? |
18:58.36 | pb_ | right. |
18:58.51 | kencausey | hmm |
18:58.57 | kencausey | What if pages were checked into CVS? |
18:59.13 | pb_ | Yes, we could do that, but it probably doesn't buy much. |
18:59.29 | kencausey | I suppose not. |
18:59.43 | kencausey | Can you trim RCS files? |
18:59.53 | pb_ | The only advantage of CVS over RCS is that multiple people can check the tree out and work on it. I don't think we would want people hacking the content by hand, though I suppose there is no particular reason to forbid it. |
19:00.06 | kencausey | Right, I just realized that. |
19:00.27 | pb_ | Not sure about pruning. But disk space is not an issue for us anyway. |
19:08.30 | kencausey | pb_: Is there a way to store other information (properties) with each RCS checkin? And be able to quickly query it? Like version date, a username for each version? |
19:10.01 | *** topic/#hhwiki by kencausey -> HH Wiki cleanup. Janitors please apply. New HH.org site running GeekLog! http://handhelds.org/z/wiki/WikiReorganization Ken Causey gets heretical: http://handhelds.org/z/wiki/ReplaceThisWiki |
19:10.16 | kencausey | I'm assuming the obsolete packages thing is old news. |
19:12.00 | pb_ | kencausey: well, you get a "comment" field, which is effectively free-form text. RCS versions are automatically dated. |
19:12.24 | kencausey | Ah, yeah, that should work. |
19:13.21 | kencausey | Hmm |
19:13.30 | kencausey | Do we need to replicates WikWork functionality? |
19:13.40 | pb_ | What's that? |
19:13.44 | kencausey | err |
19:13.45 | kencausey | sorry |
19:13.47 | kencausey | WikiWord |
19:13.48 | kencausey | WikiName |
19:13.59 | kencausey | automatic internal links |
19:14.12 | pb_ | You mean how you type a WackyWikiWord and it automatically gets made into a link? |
19:14.17 | kencausey | Yes |
19:14.21 | pb_ | No, I find that feature annoying. |
19:14.43 | kencausey | Do we need anything like it, or is it sufficient to have users type full URLs? |
19:15.03 | pb_ | I like the way you can write [word] and have that automatically become a link. |
19:15.04 | kencausey | There are other implementations, like swiki (smalltalk wiki) uses *this is a page* |
19:15.13 | pb_ | Right, or that. |
19:15.18 | kencausey | Right, I mean the basic idea, not the way the link is written |
19:15.50 | pb_ | Being able to easily link to other pages seems valuable, but having it automatically key on StudlyCaps is undesirable because you get too many false positives. |
19:16.00 | pb_ | I want links to appear only where the author has explicitly asked for them. |
19:16.13 | kencausey | I can agree with that |
19:20.40 | kencausey | I assume you could eliminate the need to have scriptname.php as part of the URL by creating directory scriptname with index.php as the script? If you use a URL http://hh.org/geeklog/scriptname/<blah> will blah get passed as parameters? |
19:21.14 | pb_ | I think we can make that happen, yes. |
19:21.35 | pb_ | Might need a small amount of apache magic, but I'm sure it's doable. |
19:50.34 | kencausey | Would each page be an RCS file? |
19:52.58 | pb_ | Yes, I think so. |
19:56.32 | kencausey | If you get a minute look over http://handhelds.org/z/wiki/ReplaceThisWiki and see if I've covered everything. |
20:10.49 | kencausey | Being able to do something about code in pages would be nice. |
20:11.22 | pb_ | Okay, I'll take a look soonest. |
20:11.58 | kencausey | Thanks, no rush |
20:12.09 | kencausey | I'll not do anything about it until Monday probably. |
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