[pmwiki-users] RE: Page Edit Ideas

[Ben Wilson]

I normally only get the digests because this group is way to active for my
inbox. :-)

First, I have to say that I like avoiding creaping featurism. I love PmWiki's
Cookbook approach. When I see the list of nice-to-haves in the email PM posted,
I felt I had to post something. I have used several CMS tools over the years and
had to dump all of them because of feature creap that ended up ruining the tool.
I'd been tempted to write my own if only because I could control the features in
the core installation and make it more customization friendly. However, to date,
PmWiki fulfills that role.

I am of the opinion that PmWiki's default edit behavior is best. Provide us with
a set of well-integrating cookbook recipies and let the user decide which
features to include. The core should be free of extraneous features. Heck,
include all "nice-to-have" cookbook recipies in a separate tarball that we can
dump in /cookbook and then document them well.

Personally, I use the userauth recipie for user control. My long-term goal is to
find a way to make it more user-friendly so I can better administer users. With
that, I have authors required, but I removed the Author field and made it
hidden. I also use change summary.

I prefer the minor-edit checkbox because that is what most the other Wikis do.
It helps to attract users when things behave the same as what they are
accustomed to, but better. I'm not sure sticking another button would improve
that.

I even got Textarea to work, which will allow me to . . .

I have several non-profits that need a good CMS. I have been proselytizing
PmWiki, with the understanding that their present needs are such that a limited
number of users need access. So, present recipies work fine.

Please, please, keep extra features out of PmWiki core (which is a design
philosophy, if I'm not mistaken).

That said, I would like that PM's suggestion of a different security model be a
cookbook recipie. If you keep a stable core, then developers such as myself can
leverage your tool better.

--
Regards,
Ben Wilson

"Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur"