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KarenCravens
Karen Cravens

Tue

Sep 20
2005

01:44Z

The future of TWiki

I'm seriously looking at phasing out TWiki as soon as possible; if all 
goes well, Gamehawk will replace it.

This will mean being able to treat wiki pages rather like a mailing list 
itself... you will be able to "subscribe to the wiki" (having it send you 
only new pages, or all updates, or a digest of links, or whatever else we 
can think of, either by mail or RSS/Atom), or retrieve pages by NNTP, in 
addition to the usual web-based stuff.

We'll also be able to embed wikiwords in discussion posts, and otherwise 
link wiki pages directly to the discussions, either by sequence number or 
by assigning a wikiword (one assumes you'd only do that to Significant 
Posts).  All this sort of stuff will get nailed down a little more firmly 
in the future, with examples and stuff in case you're going "Huh? 
How/what/why?"

At the moment, I'm planning to use a slightly modified TWiki notation 
parser as our default for both wiki pages and discussion posts, chiefly 
to facilitate converting existing TWiki pages.  I haven't gone through the 
current stuff to see what we're using in the way of features... are we 
doing a lot of includes and other "advanced" features, or are we just 
using TWiki notation and wikiword linking and not much else?  What can't 
we live without in a conversion... and what do we need that we've had to 
do without so far?

-- 
Karen J. Cravens  silver@phoenyx.net
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KarenCravens
Karen Cravens

Mon

Sep 26
2005

01:36Z

The future of TWiki

On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Karen J. Cravens wrote:

KJC>What can't we live without in a conversion... and what do we need that 
KJC>we've had to do without so far?

Okay, so... nothing then?

-- 
Karen J. Cravens  silver@phoenyx.net
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AndrewJanssen
Andrew Janssen

Mon

Sep 26
2005

03:54Z

The future of TWiki

Karen J. Cravens wrote:

> On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Karen J. Cravens wrote:
> 
> KJC>What can't we live without in a conversion... and what do we need that 
> KJC>we've had to do without so far?
> 
> Okay, so... nothing then?
> 

Well, there are a few things, but what with being put in a cast and all, 
I've been a little distracted.

With Celandra, we use a lot of Twiki, but I don't think even we use it 
to the fullest. My major frustrations with Twiki in its current form 
(which actually aren't that big a deal):

1. No ability to adjust the default normal text size or font--I'm 
nearsighted and astigmatic, and the Twiki default text is hard for me to 
read, even with glasses. It would be nice to be able to choose between 
serif and sanserif fonts, or between fixed-width or variable.

2. Some sort of word-wrapping ability. On some of our pages, we've got a 
skinny two-column table that runs two window-lengths or more with ugly 
empty white space filling the screen to the right of the table. If a way 
of wrapping text around graphics or tables could be implemented, that 
would be nifty.

Caveat: I know nothing about the coding involved, so I don't know what's 
implementable or not.

Andrew
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KarenCravens
Karen Cravens

Wed

Sep 28
2005

00:22Z

The future of TWiki

On Sun, 25 Sep 2005, Andrew Janssen wrote:

AJ>1. No ability to adjust the default normal text size or font--I'm 
AJ>nearsighted and astigmatic, and the Twiki default text is hard for me to 
AJ>read, even with glasses. It would be nice to be able to choose between 
AJ>serif and sanserif fonts, or between fixed-width or variable.

The current TWiki is skinnable, though I don't think we have anything 
particularly fancy installed.  Try appending ?skin=print to the end of an 
URL for an example.

The new stuff will use CSS, so we'll be able to do all sorts of fancy 
stuff with it, including customization at the individual user level.

Firefox can increase font size with alt-plus (or is it control-plus?  I 
forget) and -minus, for whatever that's worth.

AJ>2. Some sort of word-wrapping ability. On some of our pages, we've got a 
AJ>skinny two-column table that runs two window-lengths or more with ugly 
AJ>empty white space filling the screen to the right of the table. If a way 
AJ>of wrapping text around graphics or tables could be implemented, that 
AJ>would be nifty.

Yeah, tables are just plain b0rken.  That's hard to do in any plaintext 
mode, though.  (You can always write regular HTML, but that sort of 
defeats the purpose.)  I can't remember off the top of my head what 
Markdown does with tables, nor how well the Perl modules for Word 
conversions and such handle tables.

-- 
Karen J. Cravens  silver@phoenyx.net
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