Revision [12137]
This is an old revision of RyeBread made by DarTar on 2005-12-07 08:27:01.
First off, thanks to the team for creating such an excellent wiki. I spent a lot of time sampling different programs and I chose this one because it seemed to be a great all-around tool plus easily extensible... which leads me to my next point. :)
After pushing for months, I finally convinced my office to use a wiki for design and documentation collaboration. After 24 hours of setting it up, 50+ pages were created by various members of the team. Not bad, if I do say so myself. Nevertheless, already I have gotten feedback on some things that they wish could be implemented in order to make their lives easier and to help increase the enthusiasm across the office.
I haven't really looked too deep yet into these issues. I would like to work on these and contribute code but in the meantime, I just want to jot the notes down here and make them public while I am at work doing paid labor. :) I'll formalize them into the SuggestionBox or plugin requests later.
-Rye
System Setup:
- Wikka Wakka Wiki 1.1.6.0 (with extensions)
- Uniform Server
- Apache 2.0.54
- PHP 4.3.11
- MySQL 4.1.12a
- Windows XP SP2
Open Issues:
- Rye, I hope you won't mind if I add inline comments to your suggestions
- Smart Plural Parsing
Both designers and engineers would like to be able to have the wikiwords "UserWidget" and "UserWidgets" refer to the same page when discussed without needing to add extra syntax. It breaks the flow of typing if they have to mentally stop to add "[[ ]]" everytime they cognitively process a plural noun.
- This feature, already discussed somewhere, only make sense for languages like English, which have a somewhat regular rule ("add an -s suffix") for plural formation. This is obviously not the case for most natural languages: French, German and Italian, just to give some examples, have a lot of different (and morphologically unpredictable) rules for plural formation. But even in English, how would you handle irregular cases, like witch,witches, fish,fish and the like? These are the reasons why we were(and still are) so reluctant to implement this feature.
- Namespaces
I almost went with FitNesse because of this feature (but didn't like their interface or markup). Rather than have separate pages like "WidgetDesign1_0" , "WidgetDesign1_5" and "WidgetDesign2_0" we could have "ver1_0/WidgetDesign" , "ver1_5/WidgetDesign" and "ver2_0/WidgetDesign". A page that linked to "WidgetDesign" "" would actually link to the page with the same namespace as itself.
In other words, this wiki is great because it tracks revisions like CVS but doesn't provide the ability to branch a document into a different version.
- Yes namespaces is a nice addition, although as far as I know most namespaces use a reverse order, e.g. Mainpage/Subpage etc. - see for instance what Wacko does.
- Wikiword Override Rule Sets
The ability for an admin to provide say a simple text file that, whenever Wikka parses a Wikiword, it will check the list to see if it should substitute a different link rather issue the default behavior.
- Interesting, can you give an example of possible use?
- Mass Page Import
The ability to import or mass create/edit pages into the wiki without actually being inside. For example, import pages generated from Doxygen during our nightly build process. (I assume this is probably just a php/mysql script on the wikka database.) Or, if easier, just use a Wikiword Override Rule Set to force certain doc links to point to a different web.
- Ideas for mass page importing are welcome, although I think what most users would like to see is an import feature, similar to HTML2Wiki
- Visio Support?
I haven't played around with FreeMind very deeply, but immediately engineers asked me how they could import Visio diagrams and include links to them in the pages.
- Forced Template Usage
The ability to force users that want to create new pages to use a template. Also, once editing a templated page, users shouldn't be able to directly change the templated elements contained within but can use, say, actions, to fill in some content. Example: can't reposition or reformat the page title header but can use an action to specify what should be rendered as the page title header.
- This would be a highly appreciated feature, and it has already been suggested by many users in the mailing list. I think Wikka would benefit from forcing templates on new page creations in many cases (userpages, documentation pages, development pages etc.).
- Note Recollection
If I add a chunk of content to a page, and record a little note about it, store it, and then within my little window of opportunity I reedit to fix a typo, the same note should appear as a default.
- I don't get this
- Feature Log
If the wiki admin adds a plugin, the a description of the system change as well as a timestamp will show up for all users to be informed that some new functionality has been implemented. Something in the style of the RecentChanges page. I could do this manually, but I am trying to imagine if there is something that could be done to make it feel more integrated with the wiki itself.
- This could go together with an interface allowing admins to enable/disable specific plugins. DennyShimkoski has posted some interesting InstallableActions code in this sense, I'd love to see further development on this.
- Email Notification of Comments
See my thoughts on the subject: RyeBreadDraftsEventNotification Event Notification System Draft
- Revision-in-progress
Similiar to "recently edited social awareness functionality", a little icon that would appear on a page informing the user that someone has opened it up for editing in the past x minutes. (This seems really easy to do.)
Annoyances To-do:
- The WikiEdit toolbar is not rendering appropriately in the Opera browser.
- How do I link to a specific category page without having the source page belong to that category?
- When I edit a page and try to add another bullet to an existing bulleted list and hit enter, the page editing box shifts back up and I lose my cursor position.
Extensions:
Key: Blue indicates extensions deployed, Red indicates extensions I want to use but with different behavior, Green indicates extensions I've created.
- WikiBreadcrumb
- Recently edited social awareness functionality
- AcronymFormatter
Needs its list definable through a wiki page rather than hard-coded.
CategoryUsers