[Moin-devel] Page Permissions

[Nick Trout]

> From: Magnus Lycka [mailto:magnus at thinkware.se] 
> Sent: February 3, 2003 1:49 AM
> To: Nick Trout; moin-devel at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: RE: [Moin-devel] Page Permissions
> 
> At 11:03 2003-01-31 -0800, Nick Trout wrote:
> >I though wikis were supposed to be simple.
> 
> Yes. Simple programs, perhaps not too simple to USE...
> 
> Wikis weren't intended to be for everybody. The original wiki
> is certainly intended to be a forum for programmers, and it's
> basically considered a benefit if some people feel reluctant to
> contribute.
> 
> See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorks

Well there seems to be a conflict of interest even on the page you quote
:) 



> If you want a CMS for non-techies, shouldn't you use something
> with wysiwyg editor etc? MoniMoineese isn't completely forgiving.
> Things like trailing spaces messing up headlines etc are bound
> confuse people. Tables are all too limited, etc, etc.

They're not that non-techy. My main concern has been that they lose work
through collisions (or stupid browser bugs). I've looked at a number of
CMS packages in the past but I don't think any of them are as flexible
as a wiki. The majority seem to have this nuke-portal style frame layout
which I don't like. A lot don't have dynamic content editing of pages. I
think you tend to post information to CMS rather than iterate it.


> In trying to "fix these little shortcomings" you will loose its
> wikiness I fear...

Equally I could say, well if Moin isnt wiki enough, there are other
wikis out there that are more pure wiki, why don't you try those? Who is
right? You might might a simple text editor which you add a few features
to. At what point does it become a word processor? You might argue that
Moin is not a wiki now because it has formatters, macros, stats etc. Are
you saying that these are "shortcomings"?


> >Yes. I like moin and it's a lot more modular than a lot of wikis out
> >there. TBH since I started using Moin I've thought of a lot 
> more things
> >that I can do with it and I am starting to see it more as a CMS.
> 
> I've seen it a bit like that too, and I'm (as you notice) turning
> away from that attitude. Maybe it could be useful to build a component
> system where wikis and CMS and preprocessing for static pages etc
> could be implemented by combining a set of MoinMoin(?) building block
> in different configurations. But that's not what MoinMoin is today,
> and I think it's bad to see a wiki as a CMS.

That's an interesting idea. Moin is pretty customisable already but I'm
sure it can go further. Its obvious that there are varying opinions
about how wiki should be used. There are different audiences who read
and maintain, different sets of information to be stored, and different
presentations. Perhaps something like plone might be a better solution
but when I looked at it proved to be very complicated (and currently
incomplete - and moving slowly). Moin has the advantage of being simple
and modular to start with so could be customised more easily.

Each site could be analogous to an orginal thought:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OriginalThought


> If you really want a CMS, I think you will see that the demands for
> features will grow contunally, and if the base was something that
> was initially intended to be as simple as a wiki, I think it might
> turn out very top heavy and maybe tumble over eventually.

That depends how modular and customisable it is. You can do a lot with
macros in the wiki to add nice little site specific features that need
not complicate the main distribution. I think the idea (although I
havent read it anywhere) with Moin is that it is a simple, modular core
that can be customised well. The core is maintained by the  lead
developers and the plugins are developed and contributed by the
community.

Wrt page locking whilst editing I came to the list to ask how I might do
this with no, or minimal, changes to the codebase since I thought this
might be just specific to my needs. People seems divided about its use,
and its use is optional. If there were a way to plug it in so you could
customise your site then perhaps that would more beneficial but noone
pointed out a way where this was possible (or the implementation was
desirable). Perhaps Moin needs more "feature hooks" so people can attach
site specific features. eg. presentation, access control, editing,
processing etc.

Regards,
Nick