[pmwiki-users] using PITS as a project manager

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 10:30:06AM +1300, John Rankin wrote:
> On Tuesday, 8 February 2005 6:57 PM, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> >Here's a candidate: how about figuring out how to handle PmWiki's
> >FAQ document, or developing a way to index FAQ and PITS entries together
> >and still make sense of them?  
> >
> >Take a look at http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/FAQ and you can 
> >see that it somehow "doesn't work".  One problem is that with all of the
> >questions combined it's not easy for an inquirer (or respondent)
> >to easily track individual questions.  Tracking items is what PITS
> >is good at, but the current PITS form isn't situated around supporting
> >a FAQ.
> 
> Do you mean something like the following:
> - each question is its own page, entered and updated through a form
> - we define a list of categories into which questions might fall
> - the FAQ form contains a series of check boxes for categories
> - we use the category markup to let us see questions arranged by category

Yes, although I hadn't taken it forward to using wiki categories.  That's
a possibility.  I was just thinking of using something similar to the
(:pitslist:) directive to be able to sequence the entries by category,
as well as keep some sort of separate tracks for items that are FAQ
versus bug entries.

> - we use the same category scheme for PITS entries and cookbook entries
> - one also wants a simple mechanism for creating see-also references among
>   PITS, FAQ and recipes (and possibly see references within each group)
> - for example, on a FAQ page, automatically list all the recipes with the
>   same categories, with a teaser paragraph summarising the capability

Yes, this is along the items I was considering.

> - OTOH, mailing list threads are excellent because they are push not pull;
>   I'm not sure it's a good idea to move them to the wiki

I agree -- I much prefer the push nature of mailing list threads.  I'm
still trying to come up with good ways to migrate issues and results
from the mailing list onto permanent locations in the site.  Really I
just want the best of all worlds.  :-)

> I agree. At the moment, what happens is that editing an existing page via
> the form will get lost at the point where a field is inserted or deleted.
> However, this is an implementation detail and shouldn't be a showstopper. 
> I felt I had earned a rest after working out how to take an existing page 
> apart.

Undoubtedly -- I'm quite impressed by the overall design.

Pm