Re: [wmii] New Website?

On May 18, 2006, at 11:49 PM, Kris Maglione wrote:

> I've already volunteered to do a rewrite in Ruby (not Rails) but I
> have clear some details with garbeam first. I agree about the ?
> key=value queries. I'm more concerned about the wiki syntax,
> though. The lack of wiki escaping and in some cases lack of ability
> for more complex formating (the color schemes page) are more
> important to me. Proper revision history would be nice too and I
> don't think I'll be able to resist writing a wikifs frontend :) I
> think that garbeam wants it to be a small/simple wiki, though, and
> I tend to agree, so I'm not taking any leaps.
>
> I think the syntax merits discussion.

Don't get me started on a syntax debate. I'll be here all night.

Taking the short route:

Since this is a wiki designed for outwards presentation and not
inward collaboration, why not use a fully-fledged syntax like
Markdown (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/)? Just drop it
into the existing code (I assume it is written well enough that this
can be done) and be done with it. It'll look nice, produce valid
html, have a nice and powerful syntax, and do the job it is intended
for. No need for a rewrite I don't think. No matter how bad garbeam
says it is, I'm sure it is better than 95% of the shit that is out
there. I do not think a revision history and full reverting interface
is necessary given that you need a password to edit, and the number
of people editing is very small (less than ten, I assume). Just
backup as normal with a cron script. The amount of time you'd spend
implementing this as part of the wiki will never be recovered unless
you're reverting pages rather often. Given the nature of the site, I
expect such things to be rare, maybe once a month at most.

- John
Received on Fri May 19 2006 - 06:09:55 UTC