[pmwiki-users] Ideas from JotSpot

[Joachim Durchholz]

Hi all,

Just for your information: there's a new Wiki called JotSpot 
(http://www.jotspot.com), and I thought we might glean ideas from that.

Here's what JotSpot does that PmWiki doesn't currently do, and that I 
found remarkable:

1) It has a WYSIWYG editor. (Important. PmWiki is on the light side with 
markup, but it's already too much for nontechies. I have watched 
nontechies find their way, and there are still too many obstacles. I 
don't have the fuzziest idea how one could implement that, short of 
writing a user client program or an Open Office plug-in.)

2) Every page in an Inbox. Great for adding discussion entries, and for 
publishing Email discussions (just forward or CC the stuff). (Dubious 
value, but might be useful for some. Might be good as a recipe.)

3) Full-text index for searches. (Might require some hooks in PmWiki, 
but no big deal otherwise. Would be helpful to do some solid cache 
invalidation as well, so this doesn't just increase end user experience 
but also has technical merits.)

4) Forms. Seems to be a list of controls ("widgets" in X Window speak) 
that can be placed on a page, and linked up with some script language. 
(Too complicated for my taste. Lots of work to implement, and end users 
are incapable of putting this to good use.)

5) MS Word and Excel document integration. (The ability to paste Rich 
Text would be a better alternative I think. Don't know whether browsers 
would be able to transmit anything than ASCII characters though...)

Oh, and it's hosted on a central server. So the more data you add the 
more locked-in you are - clever idea.

Regards,
Jo