Re: Wiki, [was: Re: [Chicken-users] Powered by Spiffy/Scheme logo?]

[Shawn Rutledge]

On 3/11/06, felix winkelmann <address@hidden> wrote:
> Speaking of wikis: I've put together yet another feeble attempt of writing
> web software (boy, am I modest, or what?) at this place:
>
> http://galinha.ucpel.tche.br/coop
>
> It's a regular wiki, currently with a rather llimited set of editing
> commands and it uses some homegrown markup. I could have used
> Alejandro's excellent stream-wiki, but the idea is to provide a simple
> to process internal format, since I'd like to support programmatic
> access (via some HTTP-based API, or even by allowing sandboxed
> Scheme code - I'm not sure yet).

Is that why the syntax is different?  I agree that it's a good idea to
support programmatic extensions somehow.  Is the source available?

I've been working on a wiki too, based on Alejandro's stream-wiki.  I
don't have anything worth sharing yet, just getting started but I have
lots of ideas.  I am most familiar with MediaWiki (from the
perspective of using it, haven't done much hacking on it) so I'd like
to have most of its features and then some.  Most wikis leave room for
improvement in how they handle images.  I also want to have full
version-control like MediaWiki does.  svnwiki seems good but I think I
will take a different approach rather than depend on subversion.  (So
far I'm leaning towards a fuse-based filesystem which does version
control, which I may end up having to write; we'll see.  I found
something called wayback which seems to be a good start.)  I don't
like how most of them depend on a relational database, and serve every
page by doing a database lookup  and then dynamically generating the
page.  Mine will generate static pages, and be dynamic only (or
mostly) when you are editing.  So that should be really quick, but I
wonder if it's better to use Spiffy for everything, or try to have
Apache or a kernel-based httpd serve the static pages and delegate the
dynamic stuff.  I haven't done anything with fastcgi or scgi yet so am
not sure what the best approach will be.  I will probably just stick
with spiffy until I get the features fleshed out more.

Another feature (which might or might not be a good idea) is to have
folders, rather than a single namespace.  A problem arises when you
try to use a conventional wiki for multiple projects - you have to be
careful to choose sufficienty verbose titles for the pages, so that
you don't use up all the good names for one project.  So I think I
will make it possible to partition parts of the wiki in actual
directories on the server.  That way different directories can have
different permissions too.  At work, we used mediawiki for a while,
and then pretty soon people wanted to have some stuff be public, and
some be private to our department, and we didn't find a way to do it. 
So we had to make the whole thing private (using a .htaccess file). 
What does Spiffy have for security?

An alternate approach (rather than directories, to avoid namespace
crowding) would be to use machine-generated names for the pages so
they are guaranteed unique.  And then you need a richer UI for
creating the links, so you don't have to type in long numbers.  This
gets into Xanadu territory.