Re: [wikiss-users] Derivative work

Hi All,

I'm glad to hear that you are interested in such work.

Here are some of the goals ...

The format of the data should be kept simple – one file per page, page name the same as page file, the content of the file still readable without the wiki text renderer. We'd like to have the information written in the text files to be available forever, regardless of what's the next programing language or what is the operating system or what the databases will be in 20 years. That's why we chose flat-file based system.

We keep most of our organization's projects' documentation in plain text format but also would like to see them nicely presented on a web page, so wiki is good for that.

One of the ideas is that the pages' store could be put in a version control, such as CVS, and this way keep multiple locations (almost) always in sync.

Example:

I can work off-line on some pages or documents, let's say writing documentation for a software project or doing research and taking notes, later I will commit those change in the version control which in its turn will trigger update on a website ran by this wiki and this way the updated text will automatically appear on the public website.

Another goal: an improved and well developed plugin architecture, yet simple, so most of the new functionality could be moved in plugins.

Plugins implemented so far:

* Blog – allows to add blogs by date specifying a subject. The pages' files could be kept in separate folder to keep the main folder clean. To each blog entry could be added comments.

* Comments – allows to write comments for pages, including blog entries. There is Captcha added for Spam protection. Comment pages could be kept in separate folder (not finished yet) to keep the main folder clean.

* TOC – allows to structure the document by using headings and later generate a table of contents that could be shown at the top of the rendered page. This is rather improvement of the existing TOC code and moving it to a plugin.

The pages for comments and blogs could be kept at different location/folder so the pages' storage will remain clean of unnecessary files. This is done through plugin specific configuration files.

Modules are like plugins but they provide only functionality, they do not modify the content. There is only one module implemented so far:

* Captcha – provides all necessary functionality to add captchas to the Comments plugin.

Other improvements: the most important entities in the system were put in classes; added more comments in the code (in English).

Some work in progress:

* Zones – break the wiki site into different areas for different purposes – let's say development, based on region or even for different languages for multilingual websites.

* WYSIWYG text editor – very simple with basic functionality.

* Renderer – the wiki format rendering should be put in a module/plugin, should be documented too.

* Tables – that should be a plugin that will visualize CSV data, either from a file or inline.

* Localization – should be implemented as a plugin or module, constants/variables should be used instead of strings.

* Authentication – should be with username/password. May be in the future add list of user, not just one.

I don't know if it is good idea to send the source in this mailing list (anyone disagrees?) but we intend to run a separate website where everyone could download it. I'm going to register a SF.net project for that purpose, with publicly available version control too.

I just wanted to know if anyone involved in the previous works (Tiger, Wikiss, etc.) has any objections.

Regards,

Neven.