Revision [20011]
This is an old revision of RichardMartinNielsen made by RichardMartinNielsen on 2008-06-06 16:58:43.
RichardMartinNielsen: What I'm doing with Wikka
I'm experimenting with using WikkaWiki in the InvisibleWiki invisible form and the WikiInAVacuum model to replace a CMS (www.joomla.org Joomla) for an organisation's website being hosted by a commercial provider on a LAMP stack.
I've also looked at trying to use MediaWiki but have found it easier to "thin down" the features of WikkaWiki than pruning MediaWiki.
My development environment is MAMP on a Mac mini at home. My production environment is a commercially supplied LAMP stack. Once I've built a functioning system on my home machine I'll be trying to transfer it to the production system, likely by doing a recursive diff down a plain-vanilla install then figuring out which bits need to be patched (and possibly rolling my own .tgz to upload).
My current challenges
- My current chief bugbear is an amazing shrinking WikkaEdit. It's largely my own fault, probably - I've borrowed a chunk of template code from elsewhere which creates a page_outer div around the page, and I think that this is what is confusing matters. Essentially, when I fire up the editor, the resize code shrinks it by 20px every go through until it hits its minimum. I tried applying the "2e methode" proposed by Olivier Borowski under bug #375 but have so far succeeded only in getting a fixed-height editor. This is nearly preferable for me. Sorted. Mostly.
I managed to drop some javascript in where it probably didn't belong, and got a dump of the sizes my poor editor is looking at.
document.body.clientHeight: 811 document.documentElement.clientHeight: 758 document.body.scrollHeight: 811 document.documentElement.scrollHeight: 898 document.body.offsetHeight: 811 document.documentElement.offsetHeight: 817
I suspect it's being confused by the difference of document.documentElement.clientHeight (758) vs document.body.offsetHeight (817). This would give me a negative change, even if the window's not being modified.
- Implementing the invisibility (80% done)
- I've now created actions (tentatively named prettyrecentchanges and prettycategory) which strip out a lot of the Wikiness of these actions so that they can be included within other pages. Each is using a small uncamel function which is just used on specific portions of the text.
- PrettyRecentChanges and PrettyCategory are helping present a largely invisible wiki to the viewing public. (So far it's just me because I'm not quite confident to go live on a production server yet.)
- Transferring a developed-by-me Joomla template into something which will look very similar in WikkaWiki (55%)
- Figuring out a clean files interface. I liked the WikiFile system (particularly in terms of being able to upload material easily which can then be included in other pages) and have only just managed to get it working. (100%)
- CamelCase is a bit of a pain. My organisation is located on MacKay street and has many Scottish members.
- A pointer to the simple instructions of how to clone an entire Wikka Wiki from one server to another would be very welcome.
Other notes
- Like some others, I'm peeved by the formatter creating Valid XHTML which is littering text with line breaks where it should really be using paragraphs. If I get distracted, I may join those tilting at the windmill of getting the formatter to create paragraphs. My inherited CSS does paragraphs nicely. Line breaks look bad. But I've really not looked at the formatter code, and it frightens me a little.
- Wandering through other Wikka's I found that some editors didn't show the buttons for H1, H2, H3. It doesn't take long to discover that this can be emulated with the modern WikkaEdit by commenting out lines 74 and 75 of wikkaedit_data.js
Strange ideas
I'm pondering trying to write a version of the category action which would use the Wakka-generated best-guess of the title of pages listed and present those instead of the plain CamelCase links. This would hide some of the internals from general users. I've now discovered LinkUsingPageTitle but it appears not to be ready for prime time. Yet. And it's not quite what I wanted, but I may borrow code. I'm going to try putting UncamelAction into play, perhaps just on the category pages. - Done: See PrettyCategory