[Pmwiki-users] Re: Action or form for creating a new page

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Tue Feb 3 14:54:29 CST 2004


On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 10:10:41PM +0100, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
> > > Maybe it'd be good to have a link called 'New page', that when you click 
> > > on it gives you a page with an edit form. But this edit page also lets 
> > > you specify the name of the page that will be created?
> > 
> This was just a "proof of concept". What do people think of the principle 
> though?  (Personally, I'll just continue to use Emacs/pmwiki-mode).
> I just thought that something like a 'New Page'-link might be good for 
> beginners and played a bit with it. Maybe you could file it with 
> other good/less good ideas :-)

A good place for us to file this and other good/less good ideas is in the 
Development pages on pmichaud.com, especially on the DevelopmentPriority
page.  We can create a Development page describing the idea/concept, and
others can easily vote on its importance/desirability.  I know that 
there's an entry there for pre-defined templates but no description.

This is another of those cases where I think it's a good idea to
propose a new feature idea to the mailing list and for us to make sure
that the description makes it into wiki pages somehow.

Which brings me to a (IMO) very important idea, in answer to the
question that John Feezell posed in his email about new features for
the wiki [1].  Earlier in January there was a discussion thread [2] about
making sure that information gems from the listserv making it into
recorded history somewhere, and we've just seen another instance
where this looks to be highly desirable.  I think PmWiki (or at least 
the PmWiki developers) could really use automated support for this,
and it might be very useful for collaborative contexts in general--
much more powerful than what can be done with simple listserv or 
news archives.

What I really wish I could do is to use my mail agent to forward excerpts
of an email message such as Christian's to be posted (appended?) to a 
wiki page.  Ideally I don't want to have to do lots of editing on the
mail before sending it, I want to be able to quickly indicate which
parts of the message should be written to which page without having to
delete a lot of text or do multiple sends, and I want the program on 
the receiving end to do some preliminary reformatting of the message 
text to be easier for someone to edit in the wiki markup
(e.g., removing or reformatting '> ' mail quotations, etc.)  It's not
important that the wiki get the formatting exactly right, because
someone can edit it later--the important aspect is that the message
can be quickly preserved.

Here's an off-the-cuff storyboard overview of the process:
  1.  I receive an email with content that I think is appropriate for
      an entry on the wiki
  2.  I hit "forward to wiki at pmichaud.com" in my mail agent
  3.  I use my mail agent's editor to add tags to indicate the parts
      of the message to be posted to which pages.  For example:
          text leading up to the important stuff
	  [[post Development.NewPageLink]]
	  ...text I'm interested in putting on the wiki
          [[postend]]    (or maybe just [[post]])
	  ...text I'm not interested in preserving
          [[post Development.PageTemplates]]
	  ...text to go to a different page
          [[postend]]    (or just [[post]])
  4.  I send the updated message to the wiki posting software via email
  5.  The wiki posting software analyzes the message for excerpts to be
      added to the pages, reformatting the excerpts as needed and
      possibly adding authorship information derived from the mail
      return address.
  6.  The wiki mail software sends a reply message indicating what it did
      with the information.
  7.  The changes to the page show up in RecentChanges and page history,
      and other authors can edit/reformat the message as appropriate.

I think this would be really neat.  It would be somewhat resistant
to spam because the posted sections of text have to first be delimited by
markup before they appear in a page.  (We can come up with simple
mechanisms to easily post an entire message to a page if needed.)

Other ideas or comments related to this?  What sorts of markup directives
and other features are needed or desirable?

Pm

References:

1.  http://pmichaud.com/pipermail/pmwiki-users_pmichaud.com/2004-February/002397.html
2.  http://pmichaud.com/pipermail/pmwiki-users_pmichaud.com/2004-January/001808.html




More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list