Been too busy lately to post anything on the slender proposal thread, and it seems to have drifted a bit in focus in the meantime. But I did have a few thoughts to contribute...
1) I'm not too keen on the idea of developing divergent wiki markup systems as it is only going to add some significant challenge to providing support. There is an advantage to us sticking together--and Pm invariably makes good decisions. The price of sticking together, of course, is having to defer our personal preferences on occasion for how core works. So far however, it's been a small price to pay for some exceptional software. Having said that, I still need to get around to deleting the custom select markup I have in zap... :) 2) As for the specific suggestions in the slender proposal of a simplified markup that didn't involve leading spaces or requires \\ etc., I suspect the problem can be solved with a simple recipe or two. ZAP already has a command that does this quite nicely without making any changes to the standard PmWiki markup or its rendering engine. If someone wanted just that function, it would be easy enough to strip out the code and make it into a mini recipe. (Actually, it was about the trickiest thing I did in the entire zap system!) Of course, Pm or others could probably suggest a better solution, or Pm might be able to offer a configuration option that eliminates the need for \\. (I'd love that!). After all, an option for turning off leading spaces looks as if it might be coming soon. So, rather than fragment, my recommendation is we stick together and focus on making PmWiki better? 3) Lastly, I should add I really do like the idea of developing prebundled wikis and perhaps having a place to make them available as a simple zip file or something. The ZAPtasks project and the ZAPnews machine are two examples of quite complex wiki's involving specific recipes, config.php settings, custom pagelists, groupheaders/formats, skins, etc. What took me 40 some hours to painstakingly craft could be reproduced by someone else in about 2 minutes by downloading a pre-bundled fully functional, easily modifiable wiki. You could even add a help page or two with step by step configuration recommendations for a new user, or tips on customization options. But where do we offer that kind of thing? I could put mine up on zapsite, and may eventually, if there's any interest in these projects, but others have probably also done complex projects that could serve as a base others could use for rapid project development. It would be great to have a central repository of such wiki's and keep them updated etc., just like the scripts and skins are done currently. I suppose we could put them in the cookbook, but that is getting a bit crowded already! Any thoughts? Cheers, Dan _______________________________________________ pmwiki-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users
