[pmwiki-users] Conventions at pmwiki.org (Was: Comments pages vs ...)

Martin Fick mogulguy at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 1 13:52:39 CDT 2006


--- Ben Wilson <dausha at gmail.com> wrote:
> > One convention already in use at pmwiki.org is
> placing something like
> >
> >         %audience% authors (basic)
> >
> > at the top of each page to indicate the intended
> audience. The direct
> > consequence of this text is that it places a note
> at the top right side
> > indicating the indented reader. This is of course
> useful for someone
> > taking a quick look at the page.


One way to help encourage such a convention is to make
it easy to maintain.  Imagine Joe hacker adding a
recipe; if has to know all the conventions (I need an
audience tag?) when adding his 10 line script as a
recipe, he will probably never get it right and the
convention will quickly become out of date or simply
ignored.  Expecting others to help fill in the blanks
only works if the recipe page is readily viewed by
others.

One way to help this along is the use of edit
templates which the cookbook already does, but this
has some limits, it still does not get other authors
involved to help.  Another step which might truly help
to adopt such conventions would be the heavier use of
pagelists.  

For example, could the Cookbook Homepage be
constructed primarily with pagelists?  Recipes could
use Categories to organize them so that they show up
in the right place on the homepage.  Descriptions
could be used to fill in the description text next to
each entry.  Audience level (and possibly rating?)
could be a visible column...

Such a system would automatically highlight where the
convention is not being used, encouraging other users
to notice and fix missing data, but also it would help
the new recipe authors.  When filling out a recipe
template an new author may not really understand what
each piece of information is used for.  Having a table
readily displaying how other recipes are using certain
fields could help make this apparent.

If you wanted to go even further, you could make it a
technical requisite that certain fields be filled out
before they are listed on the Cookbook Homepage
through the use of conditionals if the
pagelisttemplate:

  (:if ! equal {=$Description} :) ...ok to list this
page


This might be a large task, but this exactly the type
of thing that the pagelist template recipe is meant to
address! :)

-Martin



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