[pmwiki-users] Input recipe

[Joachim Durchholz]

Martin Fick wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 09:23:47AM +0200, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> 
>>Martin Fick wrote:
>>
>>> No I don't know what all the need for forms are, but I do
>>> envision quite a few myself.
>> 
>> Could you list a few? It might help us expand our vision of form
>> usage, and that's definitely a Good Thing.
 >
> Sure thing mate! :)

Thanks for the input :-)

I do think that in most cases, it's just the admin who's supposed to 
edit a form page, though there are exceptions:

> -Tabular data editing where any row can be edited as a separate form.
> This could even mean editing a DB! [...] the front end can adapt to
> how the users think best fit.

(I read that as "users can adapt the forms to their taste", though it's 
not what was meant originally - but it's surely an interesting application.)

> -Create a form that adds pages to trails so that a user
>  does not need to understand bulleted lists to edit a
>  trail.

Not a good idea IMHO. One of the things that makes wiki trails useful is 
that you can have trail info and running commentary intermixed; 
"formalising" that into a form page would destroy that functionality.

> -Create a form that breaks a page into multiple sections
>  that each get edited in a sepearate input box.  Think of a
>  page describing a photo with a title section, a
>  description section, a categories section, a rating
>  section...
> 
> -New page templates, like above.

Been thinking about that :-)

Still in the administrator domain.
("Administrator domain" has two consequences: (1) it's just a single 
person who's supposed to learn and type that markup syntax; (2) the 
markup is written or modified very rarely, so the case for easy syntax 
isn't very strong - better keep those simple syntaxes for other features.)

> -Quizes with each persons answers filling out a separate
>  page or  being emailed somewhere.

Hmm... users designing quizzes... with the ability to place the input 
area anywhere on the page... interesting idea.

>   This is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm just an
> uncreative software engineer ;), don't underestimate what
> others could think of still!

I'm in the same category ;-)


>   Some of these cases could be serviced by very simple safe
> backends that would support the creation of an unlimited
> amount of forms.

I think there are two cases:

1) the backend stuff you mention above. If I understood you correctly, 
that would be defining another markup that generates the appropriate 
(:input...:) markup, which would then be further translated to the 
appropriate HTML code.
If you really insist on doing the --...-- markup, you could do even do 
that - PmWiki is flexible enough that you can define your own markup :-)

2) One-shot forms ("administrative" ones). Syntax is of secondary 
importance, giving access to as many useful capabilities of HTML as 
possible is more relevant.

Maybe there's a third case that makes forms something that everybody 
should setup by himself; I dunno - but here's your opportunity to 
describe an example :-)

Regards,
Jo