[wiki-standards] Hello - request comments on Creole

[Mike Haseler]

Reini Urban wrote:
> Mike Haseler schrieb:
>> Marc Laporte wrote:
>>> Hello Mike,
>>>
>>> I am not sure I understand your aim ("to create a basic form of 
>>> format that can be used across a wide range of applications from 
>>> wikis, to blogs, to message boards, to private messages, to adverts 
>>> for houses, to address lists for scouts").
>>>
>>> That sounds like a Content Management System. There are over a 
>>> hundred Open Source systems that you could work with:
>>> http://www.opensourcecms.com/
>>
>> My aim is fairly simple to have:
>>
>> 1. one (or many) bulletin boards
>> 2. one (or many) simple wikis
>> 3. An events calendar (AS A LIST!!!)
>> 4. a directory of local organisations/company
>> 5. email groups
>> 6. Web statistics
>> 7. Games
>> 8. Pictures
>> 9. Games
>>
>> This is going to be reproduced half a dozen times over a number of 
>> small sites I produce.
> 
> The bigger groupware wiki's already can do that in one engine.
> PhpWiki and MS Sharepoint for sure, tikiwiki I guess also.
> 

 > SharePoint has the full groupware advantage of events from an Exchange
 > server.
 > Lists are a basic wiki feature.
 >

I'm not sure I am making myself clear. An events calendar is basically a 
piece of "wiki" text with a date and time. The date and time cannot be 
text because the events need to be sorted by date so as to be displayed 
as a list by date. And to be honest most users seem incapable of 
entering a date as text without some rigorous checking.

In more complicated calendars, some items will be weekly and recur, so 
this is yet another field meaning a single "wiki" entry appears many 
times each week (apart from school holidays).

But the problem isn't the complexity of the calendar, it is the 
unwillingness of many to learn even one application properly, let alone 
get to grips with half a dozen different things, cobbled together from 
disparate software none of which looks, acts, feels or even want to work 
the same.

The typical user for this is a 60year old guider who has only just 
learnt with is the "any key" as in "press any key". Just getting them to 
register is like pulling teeth from stone. In fact on many sites, the 
only reason why most people are registered is because they have been 
registered by the website owner as otherwise they all seem to find an 
excuse as to why they can't post details of their events.

At the other end is 7year old kids who have no problem registering (but 
can't remember one password let alone one for every different game and 
who want to play e.g. http://www.lenzie.org.uk/games/dk/index.php. 
Usually, on the boards, they enter something really stupid onto 
basically have a great time trying to see whether they can bring down 
the system with lines hundreds of characters long.

I could also add to the list a:

1. active chatroom
2. A password protected photo album

Then there are the spam agents who mean that only those explicitly 
authorised to post URLs should be allowed to post them

>> The aim is to have all the applications protected (or enabled in the 
>> case of games with user-highscores) by a single username/password with 
>> a central interface for decide which groups have what privileges for 
>> which applications. E.g. only scouter leaders can post emails but 
>> anyone who belongs to the group "scout parent" can see and subscribe 
>> to the scout newsletter.
> 
> Simply use HttpAuth for any wiki. Many support that.
> Even Mediawiki can be hacked to support that.
> 

The eventual aim is to allow other people to "hack" the code. Other 
people being 11year olds developing their own website (with some 
supervision). Whilst it may be feasible for them to "hack" wikimedia, 
really wikimedia needs to adjust to suit the eleven year olds, rather 
than the 11years old suddenly gaining years of web-programming 
experience just to have a password protected page for their friends with 
a bit of fun PHP.

Mike