[pmwiki-users] Recommended recipes?

Simon nzskiwi at gmail.com
Fri Aug 28 15:10:44 CDT 2009


My contribution to this is to document the reciepes etc I use here
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Profiles/Simon

<http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Profiles/Simon>simon

2009/8/27 Twylite <twylite at crypt.co.za>

> Hi,
>
> I'm new here, and I have a lengthy question that comes down to: what
> recipes are recommended and/or commonly & widely used (and how does one
> find out this information)?
>
> Background
>
> I have been looking at using a Wiki to replace two sites that I
> currently maintain.  After some investigation (c2.com, Wikimatrix, and
> plenty of other sources) I narrowed down the field, and decided that
> PmWiki has the right features and extensibility to make it the first
> candidate that I try out.
>
> The first site I want to replace is a knowledge base for my development
> team (corporate) that is currently based on Drupal.  When extensions are
> used Drupal can be a pain to maintain (a number of extensions have never
> been upgraded for Drupal 6), and it is largely worthless without
> extensions, so no maintenance is being done.  We would like to transfer
> the knowledge base across, and enhance the system by adding CRM and bug
> tracking.
>
> The second site is my personal web site, currently a blog and a few
> static pages, but I plan to include collaborative areas for projects I
> work on, and a reference section ("knowledge base") that is read-only to
> the public (but may allow comments).  I'm also keen on extending this
> setup into a farm to help out friends with their pet hosting requirements.
>
> As far as I can tell, with some customisation, PmWiki is up to the task.
>
> Customisation
>
> And then things went wrong.  Once I had waded through the general PmWiki
> documentation it became evident that customisation (by way of recipes)
> is required for event the simplest of sites, and that the Cookbook is a
> lengthy menu into the world.  Lengthy being 955 items.
>
> After my experiences with Drupal I have some requirements when
> considering add-on code.  Add-ons should be:
> - actively maintained, and/or
> - stable & feature complete, and/or
> - being considered for inclusion in the core.
>
> Many recipes have some indication of stability and maintainer, but also
> no way to tell if this information is up-to-date.  Even then there
> appears to be no way to tell if a recipe is widely used (i.e. a
> maintainer will appear spontaneously out of enlightened self-interest if
> the recipe is abandoned), well-regarded by the community (plays well
> with the core and other recipes), or a duplicate effort of a probably
> better recipe (e.g. Footnotes vs MarkupExtensions).
>
> In a quest for answers I have discovered the following:
>
> * I figured that looking at the extensions PmWiki.org was running would
> be a good place to start.  This information is available via a link from
> http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/RecipeCheck .
> * Bundles (http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Category/Bundles) look promising,
> but most efforts seem to be incomplete or lacking in scope or detail
> (specifically the purpose/goals of the bundle and the rationale for
> including various recipes).
> * There can be complex interactions between recipes.  Some don't work
> together, others are only useful with a supporting skin, etc.
> * There are duplicates of just about every possible feature, even some
> features in the core.  Two auth systems, three input/form systems, five
> or so ToC recipes, a half dozen approaches to comments, a dozen recipes
> for displaying attachments.
> * There have been discussions on pmwiki-users on how to rate, rank or
> otherwise determine popularity of recipes, often for reasons similar to
> my own.  These discussions date to Jan this year, Aug 2008, various in
> 2006, and even further back.
> In one PM suggests the possibility of using the statistics submitted by
> the SiteAnalyzer, but I have couldn't find whether this happened or not
> (
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.wiki.pmwiki.user/51802/match=recipes+use
> )
> * Even if you filter the Cookbook index and consider only
> stable/maintained Recipes that sound potentially useful there are still
> _dozens_, and you're no closer to figuring out which of the duplicates
> is better.
> * For what it's worth, Drupal now collects statistics of extension use
> and is using them to ensure that the most widely used extensions are all
> available for Drupal 7 on the day it is released.  This is in response
> to the disastrous situation with Drupal 6.
> * Many other projects are experiencing similar problems: huge numbers of
> extensions of wildly varying usefulness and quality going into a single
> repository, and new users to the project are lost in the morass.  Many
> projects have adopted systems of rating (based on user vote, aggregate
> rating, or committee review) and/or download rank (or usage statistics
> where available) to combat this.
>
> Help!
>
> I have now committed quite a lot of time & effort into this research,
> and I have still failed to answer my basic questions:
> (1) which recipes does everyone find useful
> (2) is a given recipe widely used, stable and actively maintained (i.e.
> will I have peace of mind choosing that recipe)
> (3) which of the duplicates is most popular (for a given task, if relevant)
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Regards,
> Trevor
>
>
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