Forms are an important aspect of making my wiki user friendly. I've discovered some limits that it would be great to overcome.
Imagine a sidebar that has a utility link that lets the user post notes to his or her profile while browsing through the wiki. The note- entry form shows information based on conditional tests, and has its own >>wikistyle<< markup. The form allows the user to enter several paragraphs, and can provide input error messages. When the user has submitted or cancelled the note-entry form, he or she ends up on the original current page. A typical user interface would provide a modal pop up form to enter the notes. But modal pop up forms don't exist in PmWiki. I've tried the next best approach using Fox forms, by sending the user to the form page and then returning him or her to the current page. But Fox doesn't work well when the form is not included on a calling page (which isn't feasible in the sidebar). Even if I included the form on the sidebar or in the footer of the current page, its conditional logic and wikistyles could interfere with the including page or vice versa - so being forced to include the form severely limits the form. Besides, inclusion is not a very user-friendly solution if the including page and form are both long. For example, they compete for the user's attention, and it's difficult to make sure the user doesn't end up scrolled somewhere else on the long page after an input error is detected. How would you provide a note-taking utility link? Will PmForms or Fox forms ever be able to handle forms that aren't included on the calling page? Randy _______________________________________________ pmwiki-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users
