Advice for developing Drupal wiki module
I'm going to be leading an effort to help raise money to pay a developer to develop and/or improve a wiki module for Drupal. If you had some money at your disposal to fund this project, how would you direct the developer to approach the problem? How much would you expect to spend? -- Dondley Communications http://www.dondleycommunications.com Communicate or Die: American Labor Unions and the Internet http://www.communicateordie.com
On Jan 9, 2006, at 9:50 PM, Steve Dondley wrote:
I'm going to be leading an effort to help raise money to pay a developer to develop and/or improve a wiki module for Drupal.
http://wiki.bryght.com/wiki/drupalwikirecipe
If you had some money at your disposal to fund this project, how would you direct the developer to approach the problem? How much would you expect to spend?
-- Dondley Communications http://www.dondleycommunications.com
Communicate or Die: American Labor Unions and the Internet http://www.communicateordie.com
Improve upon existing wiki module. Provide handy methods/UIs for adding and updating (plus themed display of) inline links to users, nodes, terms, external urls, etc. UIs should include optional but well developed AJAX interfaces, building on the existing autocomplete. Follow familiar wiki markup. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Dondley" <sdondley@dondley.com> To: <development@drupal.org> Sent: Monday, January 09, 2006 9:50 PM Subject: [development] Advice for developing Drupal wiki module I'm going to be leading an effort to help raise money to pay a developer to develop and/or improve a wiki module for Drupal. If you had some money at your disposal to fund this project, how would you direct the developer to approach the problem? How much would you expect to spend? -- Dondley Communications http://www.dondleycommunications.com Communicate or Die: American Labor Unions and the Internet http://www.communicateordie.com
On 10 Jan 2006, at 7:50 AM, Steve Dondley wrote:
I'm going to be leading an effort to help raise money to pay a developer to develop and/or improve a wiki module for Drupal. implementation wise, you should use Relationships for all the links.
and be able to create multiple wiki's on a single site. So that you can give each organic group / sub project it's own wiki to work with. -- Adrian Rossouw Drupal developer and Bryght Guy http://drupal.org | http://bryght.com
Chop it up: * wikisyntax module = a filter * [[wikilinking]] = a freelinkinging module * revisions = core * oh, wait, we have that already. :p Really, its possible since a long time. It makes me wonder again: how can it be that people have such a hard time to grok how to use several modules to achieve a single thing? I have seen this a million times with weblinks module, where people wanted a *view* with it, which I did not put in deliberately, because there are so much better views modules. The recipes at bright points people in the right direction, but might still be too hard to grok? Bèr Op dinsdag 10 januari 2006 06:50, schreef Steve Dondley:
I'm going to be leading an effort to help raise money to pay a developer to develop and/or improve a wiki module for Drupal.
If you had some money at your disposal to fund this project, how would you direct the developer to approach the problem? How much would you expect to spend?
-- Dondley Communications http://www.dondleycommunications.com
Communicate or Die: American Labor Unions and the Internet http://www.communicateordie.com
-- PGP ber@webschuur.com http://www.webschuur.com/sites/webschuur.com/files/ber_webschuur.asc PGP berkessels@gmx.net http://www.webschuur.com/sites/webschuur.com/files/ber_gmx.asc
Bèr Kessels wrote:
Chop it up: * wikisyntax module = a filter * [[wikilinking]] = a freelinkinging module * revisions = core
oh, wait, we have that already. :p Really, its possible since a long time.
It makes me wonder again: how can it be that people have such a hard time to grok how to use several modules to achieve a single thing?
In this case, because you forgot entirely about permissions. jh
oh, wait, we have that already. :p Really, its possible since a long time.
Yes, it's true. I've got a wiki on my a site of mine for many months without ever seeing Bryght's guide. But it certainly isn't polished or very user friendly. There's a bg difference between cobbling together functionality out of sticks and constructing one solid module carefully with bricks and mortar. -- Dondley Communications http://www.dondleycommunications.com Communicate or Die: American Labor Unions and the Internet http://www.communicateordie.com
Op dinsdag 10 januari 2006 14:22, schreef Steve Dondley:
Yes, it's true. I've got a wiki on my a site of mine for many months without ever seeing Bryght's guide. But it certainly isn't polished or very user friendly. There's a bg difference between cobbling together functionality out of sticks and constructing one solid module carefully with bricks and mortar.
True. So you have the bricks, most of the mortar and even a buildnig-plan. What you need is find ways to make all the bricks fit. Not create a whole new set of bricks mortar and a new building plan. Or, in real English: You need to find the missing features and the places where stuff does not play well together. And fix those. Remember that we had a full featured wiki module once. But that that one was ditched because it was too big, wanted to do too much and thus never properly worked. Bèr -- PGP ber@webschuur.com http://www.webschuur.com/sites/webschuur.com/files/ber_webschuur.asc PGP berkessels@gmx.net http://www.webschuur.com/sites/webschuur.com/files/ber_gmx.asc
On 1/10/06, Steve Dondley <sdondley@gmail.com> wrote:
oh, wait, we have that already. :p Really, its possible since a long time.
Yes, it's true. I've got a wiki on my a site of mine for many months without ever seeing Bryght's guide. But it certainly isn't polished or very user friendly. There's a bg difference between cobbling together functionality out of sticks and constructing one solid module carefully with bricks and mortar.
Bryght's recipe is great, but we could make this much easier. I think what we need is a wiki bundle, similar to the ecommerce family of modules. * something for markup (wiki.module, marksmarty.module, or a rich text area module like FCKeditor * something for internode link syntax / node creation (like freelinking, could be made much richer) * something for the node itself (like wikipage.module, better perms on story/page/book, or a CCK content type But even that's not enough, with current Drupal. If you're looking to have someone work for pay, have them do something that's actually *needed*, something that doesn't yet exist. If you want true wikis in Drupal, the filter system needs some love. It is impossible (or at least, very difficult) for something like my freelinking.module to have true wiki capabilities with the current implementation of filters. Filtering modules need to know more about what they're working with. One example is having a node know who authored it, and who authored the existing targets, so that multiple users could have seperate wikispace within one Drupal site. Passing the $node to hook_filter would be a step in the right direction, but as I recall that's been debated before, and I'm not about to bring that up again... umm, whoops. Other things we could do that would get us closer to actual wiki functionality: * Having a node know which other nodes are linking to it * Turning freelinking.module into an extendable API (see http://www.eafarris.com/node/959 for my thoughts on this) * Differentiating between existing and non-existing links at creation time, without the performance penalty of walking through every node.title each time * Fuzzy matching of links Some of these things are relatively simple patches to freelinking.module, some of these require more careful thought and discussion. -- e www.eafarris.com
You can consolidate all the pieces in one distribution. For example, in your install instructions, you say you need this and that ... with specific versions. The thing hate about wikis is the camel case linking. It is non-intuitive at all. The best wiki syntax and the most widespread is the Media Wiki used by wikipedia.
On 10-Jan-06, at 5:46 AM, eric Farris wrote:
On 1/10/06, Steve Dondley <sdondley@gmail.com> wrote:
oh, wait, we have that already. :p Really, its possible since a long time.
Yes, it's true. I've got a wiki on my a site of mine for many months without ever seeing Bryght's guide. But it certainly isn't polished or very user friendly. There's a bg difference between cobbling together functionality out of sticks and constructing one solid module carefully with bricks and mortar.
Bryght's recipe is great, but we could make this much easier. I think what we need is a wiki bundle, similar to the ecommerce family of modules.
* something for markup (wiki.module, marksmarty.module, or a rich text area module like FCKeditor
It has to be filter. At this time, wiki.module syntax is incompatible with all the WYSIWYG editors. And, of course, if one person creates with wiki markup with rich text disabled, then the next
* something for internode link syntax / node creation (like freelinking, could be made much richer)
Yes, I think improvements to this would be great....except, as Adrian states, it probably needs to be relationship based: inlinks, outlinks, Table of Contents (hierarchy).
* something for the node itself (like wikipage.module, better perms on story/page/book, or a CCK content type
This is the big thing that needs doing -- rename wiki.module (there is no maintainer, right?) to wikimarkup.node or similar and turn it into a bundle, with the main wiki.module producing a node and permissions.
But even that's not enough, with current Drupal. If you're looking to have someone work for pay, have them do something that's actually *needed*, something that doesn't yet exist. If you want true wikis in Drupal, the filter system needs some love.
+1 for a bunch of the concepts listed. -- Boris Mann Vancouver 778-896-2747 San Francisco 415-367-3595 SKYPE borismann http://www.bryght.com
Bèr Kessels wrote:
Chop it up: * wikisyntax module = a filter * [[wikilinking]] = a freelinkinging module * revisions = core *
oh, wait, we have that already. :p Really, its possible since a long time.
have you actually tried it? i've setup sites with both of the recipes listed at bryght.com. it is barely ok and absolutely sucks compared to a real wiki like dokuwiki or mediawiki. attention to detail is what makes these apps sing. deliving a 70% solution doesn't impress anyone when 100% solutions are freely available. i'd love it if someone took the lead in improving our wiki solution. preferably a user experience focused person.
Moshe Weitzman wrote:
i'd love it if someone took the lead in improving our wiki solution. preferably a user experience focused person.
I'm sorry, did you just use "user experience" and "wiki" in the same sentence? :-) <ducks> jh
Well, I think we all recognize wiki's aren't really meant to be used by the general population. They are definitely a geek tool. On 1/10/06, John Handelaar <john@userfrenzy.com> wrote:
Moshe Weitzman wrote:
i'd love it if someone took the lead in improving our wiki solution. preferably a user experience focused person.
I'm sorry, did you just use "user experience" and "wiki" in the same sentence?
:-)
<ducks>
jh
-- Dondley Communications http://www.dondleycommunications.com Communicate or Die: American Labor Unions and the Internet http://www.communicateordie.com
Moshe, I'm trying to get money together to pay someone to take the lead. Who would you approach? On 1/10/06, Moshe Weitzman <weitzman@tejasa.com> wrote:
Bèr Kessels wrote:
Chop it up: * wikisyntax module = a filter * [[wikilinking]] = a freelinkinging module * revisions = core *
oh, wait, we have that already. :p Really, its possible since a long time.
have you actually tried it? i've setup sites with both of the recipes listed at bryght.com. it is barely ok and absolutely sucks compared to a real wiki like dokuwiki or mediawiki. attention to detail is what makes these apps sing. deliving a 70% solution doesn't impress anyone when 100% solutions are freely available.
i'd love it if someone took the lead in improving our wiki solution. preferably a user experience focused person.
-- Dondley Communications http://www.dondleycommunications.com Communicate or Die: American Labor Unions and the Internet http://www.communicateordie.com
Op dinsdag 10 januari 2006 16:04, schreef Moshe Weitzman:
have you actually tried it? i've setup sites with both of the recipes listed at bryght.com. it is barely ok and absolutely sucks compared to a real wiki like dokuwiki or mediawiki. attention to detail is what makes these apps sing. deliving a 70% solution doesn't impress anyone when 100% solutions are freely available.
i'd love it if someone took the lead in improving our wiki solution. preferably a user experience focused person.
I am , by no means, saying that Steve should not continue! All I tried to point out, is that we have all the ingredients, or at least an exact list of them and that they now need to be made into a real meal. Sorry if people understood me saying "stop this, it is silly it is already there". "It makes me wonder again: how can it be that people have such a hard time to grok how to use several modules to achieve a single thing?". Meaning, that it is really hard to achieve, that it is not easy, but possible. Yes. I did it, and it works quite well. I am extremely happy, though, that I am not limited to only WikiSyntax, which I hate. Hence I pointed out, that making this a set of modules (like ecommerce or links) is much preferred over making one monolythic module. Bèr -- PGP ber@webschuur.com http://www.webschuur.com/sites/webschuur.com/files/ber_webschuur.asc PGP berkessels@gmx.net http://www.webschuur.com/sites/webschuur.com/files/ber_gmx.asc
"It makes me wonder again: how can it be that people have such a hard time to grok how to use several modules to achieve a single thing?". Meaning, that it is really hard to achieve, that it is not easy, but possible.
Because taking 3 modules, combining them together, and writing a bit of theme-glue to pull them together nicely is thinking like a programmer. If the end user isn't a programmer, it's a much bigger conceptual jump. It's one of the reasons Apples OpenDoc project never really took off -- in the end, it was like telling users to glue together widgets to make their dream word processor. The 5% who wanted to tweak everything liked it, but others were confused by all the 'gluing' necessary. This isn't to say that things should be dumbed down, or that they should be made monolithic. Just that modules not explicitly designed to work well together rarely have clean 'seams' when they meet. --Jeff
On 10-Jan-06, at 7:04 AM, Moshe Weitzman wrote:
Bèr Kessels wrote:
Chop it up: * wikisyntax module = a filter * [[wikilinking]] = a freelinkinging module * revisions = core * oh, wait, we have that already. :p Really, its possible since a long time.
have you actually tried it? i've setup sites with both of the recipes listed at bryght.com. it is barely ok and absolutely sucks compared to a real wiki like dokuwiki or mediawiki. attention to detail is what makes these apps sing. deliving a 70% solution doesn't impress anyone when 100% solutions are freely available.
You're right that it sucks...and I'm not entirely sure why. Diffs obviously still look terrible...but in the other wikis I use, I don't actually use diff functionality. I think it's all the extra cruft of node stuff, perhaps. I think an AJAX, edit-in-place functionality would almost turn all of Drupal into a wiki-like experience, depending on permissions. Of course, the main areas where I find myself using wiki functionality is for collaboratively working on a document.
i'd love it if someone took the lead in improving our wiki solution. preferably a user experience focused person.
I'd support this. -- Boris Mann Vancouver 778-896-2747 San Francisco 415-367-3595 SKYPE borismann http://www.bryght.com
May I also pointed out this effort by Robb, l2wiki, http://www.lab.canfield.com/projects/l2 Regards, Eric Le mardi 10 janvier 2006 à 09:37 +0100, Bèr Kessels a écrit :
Chop it up: * wikisyntax module = a filter * [[wikilinking]] = a freelinkinging module * revisions = core *
Thanks for the help received here so far. I just realized that it might be worthwhile to pay someone to develop a road map/game plan with recommendations for implementing a Drupal wiki that contained cost estimates for the developing the module's different features and functionality. Anyone willing to do something like that for $200? Is that a reasonable price?
participants (13)
-
Adrian Rossouw -
Boris Mann -
Bèr Kessels -
eric charikane -
eric Farris -
Jeff Eaton -
John Handelaar -
Khalid B -
Kieran Lal -
Moshe Weitzman -
Nedjo Rogers -
Steve Dondley -
Steve Dondley