[thesite] Status Updates on Various Projects

[Martin]

On Friday, January 25, 2002, at 12:55  am, Lindsay Evans wrote:

> There is even a PHP version:
>
> http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/

And a plugin for Slashcode:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2002/01/17/slash_plugin.html
...which has a fork which is heading towards a Perl Module
@ CPAN.

...oh in that article there's a nice explanation:

> What A Wiki Is
> "The nice thing about a Wiki is its simplicity."
>
> While the story and comment format is fine for discussions, there's a
> whole class of collaborative work that can't be done with a standard
> Slash site. Occasionally, it's useful to have a brainstorming session,
> where getting ideas down coherently is more important than following a
> traditional call-and-response question format. Business people call
> this "synergy," but it really means something here.
>
> Though I can't prove it at the moment, I suspect that's what lead Ward
> Cunningham to come up with the idea of a Wiki. It's like one of those
> smart whiteboards, where anyone can write anything and erase anything,
> but there's still a record of all revisions. The theory goes that
> putting simple but effective tools in the hands of smart people and
> staying out of the way can produce great results.
>
> So far, it's effective. The Design Patterns and Extreme Programming
> folk (and they do overlap somewhat) regularly use Wikis like the
> Portland Pattern Repository to communicate. The editors and developers
> of Perlmonks keep track of site issues and create and edit site
> documentation on special Wiki nodes. The Perl Kwalitee Assurance team
> maintains a list of untested and undertested core Perl modules.
>
> The nice thing about a Wiki is its simplicity. There are just a few
> formatting rules, and it's available to anyone who can manage a few
> HTML forms in a Web browser. They're simple to create and maintain.
> Perhaps best of all, it's very easy to create and to maintain links
> between documents. (I like similar things about the Everything Engine,
> though I'm partial.)
>
> It's very easy to write notes, definitions, or even full documents in
> places where you have several trusted, geographically diverse people
> who might use the powerful automatic linking to good effect. Several
> free software projects have their own Wikis to answer user and
> developer questions, and these often become fully fledged FAQs. If
> there were a Slash Wiki plugin, you could even write stories or site
> guides or your own site FAQ.

There's a pretty keen idea on p2 of that too:
> (It would also be nice to be able to promote a page to a Story, but
> that's probably further down the road.)
ie to use a Wiki as a brainstorming/WIP area for articles so they
get moved over to the CMS proper when they're finished.

Cheers
Martin

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