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

[Rob Miller]

Martin Aspeli wrote:
> Hi Jim,
> 
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Wicked can do this, I believe, and it will likely (pending voting) be in 
> Plone 3.0. You write ((foo)) and you get a wiki link to foo, regardless 
> of text format.
> 
> wicked is a bit AT specific, but whit is working to make it be more 
> general, and factor out the re-usable bits. I'm sure he can chime in.

i can add a bit more to this.  wicked isn't really a full wiki implementation, 
instead it focuses on the one feature that, IMO, is what really defines a 
wiki:  the ability to very easily link to existing content, or create new 
content if the existing content doesn't already exist.  notable wiki features 
that wicked does NOT cover include the handling of any particular formatting 
markup (wicked doesn't care), and revision control.

wicked was developed against AT, in that specific AT fields on specific 
content types can be made wicked-aware, so that they support wicked's ((wiki 
syntax)).  thus it becomes very easy to add wiki-like behaviour to any 
existing content type.  we don't want this to be tightly coupled, however, and 
some effort has been made to decouple it.  ideally, the injection of the 
wicked evaluation, the wiki syntax (linking only, formatting concerns are 
outside wicked's domain) that wicked honors, and the means for performing the 
wiki evaluation (currently makes heavy use of CMF's portal_catalog for this) 
would all be pluggable, usable in any arbitrary python environment that 
supports adaptation.  considerable progress has been made on this front, but 
i'm not sure what the absolute latest is.

if anyone wants to see wicked in action, you can play around in the sandbox 
project on openplans.org: http://openplans.org/projects/sandbox.  the code is 
available in the plone collective: http://dev.plone.org/collective/browser/wicked.

hth,

-r