I've been heads-down on a priority project, so it's taken me a while to get back to this thread, but I did want to respond. There's been a lot said, so I'll summarize what I thought the important points are. Hopefully I'll do the authors justice.
First, I believe Jim made the point that FlexWiki was essentially "by developers for developers". I think there's a fair amount of truth to this. Certainly if you look at the best and worst parts of FlexWiki, you find that the best parts are sort of buried or technical (WikiTalk, etc.), and the worst parts are things like lack of a WYSIWYG editor and the administrative pages that users are more likely to be stymied by. I *do* think that the characterization > It's always the same problem when programmers are turned > loose without a concept, guidance or vision. They program > the damn solutions to death, to the point where nobody > wants them because they don't solve any problems. Was a bit inaccurate, however. I'm not sure I understand why people complain that FlexWiki is not a "business-quality" piece of software when they get it for free, from a bunch of volunteers who work on it in their spare time. But that's just me whining: it remains the case that FlexWiki does not meet the needs of every business. Nor will it ever. Nor should we try. Certainly it doesn't seem to have met Mr. Winslow's needs. At 20,000+ downloads and several hundred known installations, it's definitely not the case that "no one" uses it. But in any event, it looks like Mr. Winslow got Perspective, which does meet his needs, so that's great (really!). I'll say right now that if the ScrewTurn or Perspective guys ever want to make use of our code or techniques to improve what they've already got, I for one would happily help them. And I'll just as happily throw FlexWiki in the trash and go work on one of those projects if that makes sense. I do want to thank Mr. Winslow for was taking the time to let us know what about FlexWiki he doesn't like. Most people wouldn't take the time to do that, and it's really helpful. I don't agree with parts of his analysis (for instance, we know for a fact that 1000 page wikis are common enough), but then again if you only ever hear from people you agree with, how will you ever know when you're going down the wrong path? More people should stop by and tell us why they can't use FlexWiki. On the subject of concept, guidance, and vision, I think I'd grade us about a C-minus. So again, that's a partially fair accusation. To begin with, we have to give a lot of credit to the shape that David gave FlexWiki when he was working on it: that trajectory has served us very well. The fact that the last major FlexWiki release was like four or five years ago testifies to that. If we've suffered a lack of direction since then, I take most of the blame: for the last three or four years, any potential contributors have largely been in a holding pattern waiting for me to get the wiki to the point where it's no longer completely broken. We've only recently reached that point. I *am* encouraged by the increased level of participation in the project lately - Derek, John, Nathan and everyone else have really raised the bar over just me hacking away on the innards. So I do think we could do a better job of articulating our large vision, but I'm not surprised we haven't gotten around to it before now. Right now it's a bit vague, consisting of (I think) the following major goals: * Release 2.0 with the enhancements we've made to date once we fix some performance problems. * Enhance the core engine to support a configurable parser and the corresponding object model, because we believe this is key to enabling a host of other features, such as the ability to include whitelisted HTML tags. * Increase usability. No clear vision on what this means, I think. * Make administration easier. Again, no clear vision here, either. I'm not sure whether listing these is any kind of help or not - just wanted to throw it out there. Maybe it's time to really visit that topic in depth. I'd really love it if someone other than me would lead that conversation - keep a list, make sure the thread doesn't die, solicit opinions, etc. etc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Flexwiki-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flexwiki-users
