[pmwiki-users] recipes on core elements

[John Rankin]

On Friday, 2 September 2005 7:19 AM, Radu <radu at monicsoft.net> wrote:
>Hi Pm.
>
>I've asked already how I can make a recipe available for features 
>that slightly extend an existing core function, and the answer at the 
>time was oking my suggestion of 'just copy the function, modify it 
>and put it in a cookbook file'.
>
>However, that requires potentially lots of maintainance. E.g., I 
>modified the simple tables function, and now there are changes to it, 
>the recipe has to be modified to reflect them. So a recipe creator 
>has to continuously monitor pmwiki releases and compare the
>bits they modify.

Well, one of the reasons the 'typeset wiki pages' library has
had a gestation period like that of the llama is that things
change in the underlying environment and we haven't found a
good answer to this yet. One hopes 2.0.0 (well done!) will
bring some stability for a while.

Suggestion:
One thing would really, really help: add comments in the
code whenever stdmarkup.php and wikistyles.php change --
eg like

## modified in beta 55

Mind you, since we completely replace stdmarkup.php,
we are at the foolishly extreme end of customisation.
As long as we know what has changed, we can deal with
it very easily.

The other, rather harder, wish is that pmwiki /not/
hard-code html tags inside functions. This means
we have to replace the function, rather than a
configurable variable. For example, the new handling
of [= ... =] and [@ ... @] has changed from setting 
variables to replacing a function. So this will
be more work to maintain in future.

It appears that early betas were better at this
than the later ones. It seems to me that there are
more hard-coded html tags now than there used to be,
but I could be wrong.

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin