[pmwiki-users] Recommended recipes?
Twylite
twylite at crypt.co.za
Thu Aug 27 06:15:12 CDT 2009
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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