[Pmwiki-users] Making a difference ... blue sky stuff.

[John Feezell]

Well I've been thinking about this for a few days so here goes ...

First,  PmWiki is in my opinion an exceptional program. It is feature 
rich,
         easy to install, easy to use, easy to extend, and very stable.

Second, it appears to me that many of the suggestions for changes, from 
the user-list, center around replicating features available in other 
wikis.  Many of these are excellent ideas but they don't represent "new" 
concepts in the wikiworld.

Third,  my experience with PmWiki and other wikis, suggests that
   a. many "new" users are uneasy and timid about beginning to post, and
   b. IT folks are "very" concerned about permitting an environment where 
anyone
      can create and modify web pages without first being "authenicated" to 
the system.

I use PmWiki in a university teaching environment as a collaborative tool 
to stimulate student interaction.  I also us PmWiki to support 
environments for a number of different associations. Given the new 
"author" feature, it would be helpful to me to be able to process the 
diffs on a page and extract all "post" by "author" and receive as output a 
page, sorted by "author", containing each persons contribution.  (I don't 
believe that this kind of output is available currently in any wiki.)  
Once 0.6 is stable, I plan to work on a script this idea. But why not 
include a way to collect the "author's" email address so that I could 
follow-up with an email response to a "post"?  Hopefully you get the idea.

Here's my question:
   Are there "new" features/techniques, not available in other wikis, that 
could be
   implemented in PmWik that would encourage collaborative work between 
"users" and
   at the same time cause PmWiki to standout from all other wikis?

/JF