[Zope3-dev] Grrr. zope.org wikis are evil.

[Jim Fulton]

Fred Drake wrote:
> I've mostly learned to stay away from the wikis on zope.org, but some
> days, I just forget.
> 
> I use a lot of wikis.  And I like them, really.  They're good for many
> applications, and the Zope 3 development wiki, while disorganized and
> somewhat dated, isn't really any worse than others.
> 
> Until you want to update it.
> 
> The edit form provides no link to help on markup, and there really
> aren't many wikis I use that use StructuredText, so I forget the
> details of syntax.  There's also no way to preview changes before
> committing.  That's a big problem.
> 
> I think the zope.org wikis are the only public wikis I use that don't
> support previews.
> 
> So whatever the ZF's plans for dealing with zope.org, I think there's
> no way to go wrong with the wikis except by keeping what we have now.
> While it's nice to use a Zope-based solution, I think we need to just
> get a solution that works.  That could be a Zope 2 installation with a
> recent version of ZWiki, or something else (MoinMoin would make me
> happy as well, and has good reStructuredText support these days).
> 
> So has anyone released a nice Zope 3 wiki yet?  I might be interested.  :-)

There's a Zope 3 port of zwiki.

> Yeah, I'm grumbling.  It's Friday night, and I've had it with the
> archaic StructuredText.

If we end up using Trac, we'll be using that wiki.

I have some wiki desires of my own that I'll probably never realize:

- HTML WYSIWYG Wikis that don't use any form os structures text (small s)
   and just use an HTML editor.  I think that structured text of any kind
   is an obstacle to Wiki use.  Moin moin's markup rules drive me as batty
   as old Structured Text drives other people.  ZWiki supports EPOZ
   editing and I'd love to see that used.  Of course, this sort of experience
   avoids the need for preview or structured-text documentation.

- Off-line editing.  zsync provides a huge opportunity here. I wish someone
   had time to work on it.  It would be totally cool to be able to check out
   a wiki onto a local hard disk, work on it, and merge my changes back.

Oh well.

I absolutely agree that we need to replace the existing wikis.  One other thing
we'll need to consider is anti-spam capabilities.

Jim

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