[pmwiki-users] Re: draft/Subpageish stuff (was: Re: Question about HTML output for link targets)

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Fri Feb 4 17:27:20 CST 2005


I'll start with the end question first... 

On Fri, Feb 04, 2005 at 05:57:51PM -0500, Neil Herber wrote:
> [...]
> Am I (once again) the only one confused by this? Have I missed the page on 
> PmWiki.org that explains it all?

No, you're not the only one confused by this.  The fact that it hasn't
been implemented yet is a good indication that I don't have it straight
either.  :-) :-)

> If there is a commenting mechanism, are the comments dispersed within the 
> page close to the point they are discussing? Do they all collect at the 
> bottom of the page, oldest first? Or do they live on a separate comments 
> page that is somehow linked to the original page. 

I'm looking mainly at the latter two options -- I think both should
be possible.  At this point I'm not intending to disperse comments
throughout a page, except maybe via some sort of "post-it" (TM) mechanism
somewhere down the line.  (N.B.: John Rankin's post-it markup in
Cookbook.MarkupExtended is really cool. :-)

As for the interface, in general there would either be an "Add Comments"
link or form (either/both--should be configurable) somewhere on the page
that makes it easy for authors to add to the discussion, which itself
could be stored/viewed on the same page or on a separate page (again,
configurable).

> If there is a draft mechanism, just what does a draft imply? A page under 
> construction that does not exist yet? A new version of a page destined to 
> replace an existing one? Should a draft be special in any way? For example, 
> should a draft be restricted to a single author and only open for editing 
> once it has graduated from draft status? 

Well, keep in mind that when I describe new features I always think of
them as a "capabilites to be available" as opposed to "limitations
and restrictions to be imposed".  Different sites would want different
models for drafts, and I'd want PmWiki to be able to support most or all
of them, including the conventions you described above, as well as many
others you didn't describe.

In general, I'm thinking of a draft as being a version of a page that
is somehow modified or different from the "main/base/original" version 
of that same page.  At some point the draft becomes accepted and 
gets published (merged?) into the main page.  Some sites would like
to allow many authors to concurrently work on a page "in private",
with an easy way to then "publish" the clean draft to the main page.
I can envision sites where the main page is edit-protected while the
draft version of the page is open to all (and an editor "publishes"
drafts to the main site when appropriate).  

It ought to be possible to support all of the things you mentioned
above, without restricting any particular site to only certain
configurations.

> My confusion over drafts and comments deepens when I try to shoehorn them 
> both into a "subpages" concept. I think of sub pages as totally separate 
> child pages with a common parent, which doesn't mesh very well with 
> concepts of comments that are part of the parent page or with drafts which 
> are really orphans until they are removed from the draft limbo.

Perhaps "subpages" is the wrong word here then, but I don't have a
better alternative at the moment.  The idea is simply that any particular
page may have "meta-pages" (discussion, drafts, etc.) that are somehow
related to the original page and are easy to link together.  Subpages
is mainly being examined as one possible implementation for that concept.

Pm



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