Lots of useful messages in this thread -- rather than reply individually I'll summarize my responses here.
Neil Herber writes: NH> An easy starting point "bundles" would be to add to the existing page NH> http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/ListOfBundles a few lines that NH> describe which recipes you have installed on your wiki(s) and why you NH> chose them over any possible alternatives. I totally agree -- the best thing at this point would be for us to hear what recipes people are actually using. NH> If everybody ends up posting the same list, then I guess I will have to NH> eat crow, but I suspect that every list will be different. Finding the NH> common recipes might point the way to items that should be included in NH> the core. >From experience, I also agree that I think it's highly unlikely that people will end up with similar lists. But knowing what combinations of recipes are commonly used together is really the best way to determine what sorts of bundles will be valuable. And if there are any recipes that do appear to be used on lots of sites, they're definite candidates for the core. Sandy offers: S> http://pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/ListOfBundles-Candidates S> S> An attempt at a free-form survey. May be worth changing the format as S> patterns develop. I like this approach as well, but even before grouping things into bundles I think I'd just like a survey of what recipes people are presently using (and for what sort of application). Martin Fick writes: MF> Perhaps one way to help figure this out would be to MF> have recipes indicate that they require or might be MF> simplified if they required (made use of) another MF> recipe (if such cases exists)? I don't think there are many interdependencies between recipes, and any that exist are identified by the "Prerequisites:" line anyway. I don't think the primary benefit of bundles is in resolving interdependencies (because AFAICT there aren't many), but rather in helping new admins quickly locate the recipes that someone has found to be "most useful" for a given application of PmWiki along with some quick instructions for configuring them. Steve Crisp adds: SC> I'm thinking back a year or so ago when I first came across PmWiki and SC> what would have helped me back then. I would have liked to see a single SC> page listing all 'current' recipes sorted by the number of votes they SC> had. If you are using a recipe in your solution you could simple add a SC> single vote (somehow) to the associated recipe(s).- I proposed _exactly_ this approach in March of 2006, and it was soundly rejected by people on the mailing list as not being workable [1]. Most people felt that simple "votes" were too ambiguous to be meaningful, and the discussion quickly diverged into trying to come up with measures of vitality, rating, popularity, effectiveness, etc. which I think just becomes too complex to be maintainable, so I abandoned the idea. I still think that a simple voting scheme will work incredibly well for what we want to do, which is to identify the recipes that tend to be used most often. The simple voting scheme has worked quite well with PITS, for example. 1. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.wiki.pmwiki.user/23871/focus=23891 Martin responded: MF> While I somewhat was thinking the same thing, I think MF> that there are cases where a recipe might be really MF> popular but still appropriate as a recipe, not in the MF> core. On the other hand, recipes that are building MF> blocks might not be quite as popular but could be very MF> useful for other recipe authors. I think it's important to remember that voting is intended to augment basic search patterns, not to replace it. Someone who is looking for a specific capability is likely to use standard search mechanisms to find it. But for someone who is wondering "what tools do others find useful?", a simple vote system works quite nicely. Anyway, I'm eager to see where this heads. :-) Thanks! Pm _______________________________________________ pmwiki-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users
