[pmwiki-users] Fwd: RFC PmWiki Tips and Tricks

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 03:16:48PM -0400, Crisses wrote:
> On Sep 25, 2006, at 2:56 PM, Tom Lederer wrote:
> > Am 25.09.2006 um 20:00 schrieb The Editor:
> >> I think this is a great idea--as many of the recipes aren't really
> >> recipes (as in php dropin modules).  
> >
> > actually i would suggest it the other way round: move all real
> > modules to a new module group.
> 
> You might be on to something there.
> 
> Recipes would be "Create a Blog" -- the page would point to the  
> separate methods to do so, which modules you might need, etc.
> <snip>
> So recipes become REAL recipes.  And the tools and ingredients for  
> the recipes are separate?
> Recipes for...
> * User Authentication
> * Anti-Spam security
> * Blogging
> * Forums
> * Comments
> 
> And each page points to the resources or combinations thereof, which  
> are documented on their own pages...?
> 
> Is that overly complicated?  People are asking after more and more  
> "how do I combine these?" and "which method should I use, since there  
> are 6 ways of doing this?"

At some point people were proposing the term "bundle" to represent
ways of combining recipes together to achieve some particular effect.
It didn't get too far, if only because I'm not sure there are many
recipes that really work well together as a bundle (with the probably
exception of John Rankin's many typesetting recipes, which work well
together as a bundle).

For the "which method should I use" question,, it'd be useful to
have pages/sections in the cookbook which contrast the many
ways of achieving specific results.  We can have a standard
tag or section for identifying the pages that provide comparisons
of ways to do things.  The hardest part is getting people to write
the comparisons.  :-)

And, of course, we have the category capability already in place.
As soon as I get the new (:pagelist:) code in place, I will probably
add a custom Cookbook pagelist formatter that automatically organize
and display the cookbook recipes by category (see 
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Cookbook-ByCategory for a
currently slow example of this).  Then it's just a matter of
appropriately tagging each of the recipes.

Any further suggestions are welcome, however.

Pm