[cgiapp] Future of the wiki

Wed Feb 3 04:57:20 EST 2010

I would have thought the approach should be not so much to integrate a 
wiki engine and forum engine with CGI::Application but with templating 
toolkits such as HTML::Template::Plugin::Dot.
Something like Template-Plugin-WikiCreole-0.02 
<http://search.cpan.org/%7Emartinell/Template-Plugin-WikiCreole-0.02/> 
and something similar for say mwForum. That way you have a complete 
system built from a number of components - each component has a life of 
its own,
and each component is potentially replaceable. This is something that 
CGI::Application offers over more coherent frameworks, but as it stands 
at the moment the path leads to a dead end that a web designer might be 
better off not going down.

What I think CGI::Application could really do with is a formal 
organization that produces documentation, provides some strategic 
direction for the various modules, clarifies interfaces between the 
modules, does some quality and performance analysis of the modules, 
ensures that important modules do not get orphaned and so on. The 
existence of a CGI::Application website half implies the existence of 
such an organization but these activities do not seem to be happening.

Nicholas

On 03/02/2010 01:03, cgiapp-request at lists.openlib.org wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
>
>     1. Re: Future of the wiki (Mark Stosberg)
>     2. Re: Future of the wiki (Mark Fuller)
>     3. Re: Future of the wiki (Cees Hek)
>     4. Re: Future of the wiki (Stewart Heckenberg)
>     5. Re: Future of the wiki (P Kishor)
>     6. Re: Future of the wiki (Lyle)
>     7. Re: Future of the wiki (P Kishor)
>     8. Re: Future of the wiki (Lyle)
>     9. Re: Future of the wiki (P Kishor)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 13:52:29 -0500
> From: Mark Stosberg<mark at summersault.com>
> Subject: Re: [cgiapp] Future of the wiki
> To: cgiapp at lists.openlib.org
> Message-ID:<20100202135229.3ff5c48f at summersault.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
>
> On Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:06:16 -0500
> David Kaufman<david at gigawatt.com>  wrote:
>
>    
>> Hi Gurunandan,
>>
>> Gurunandan R. Bhat wrote:
>>      
>>> I had offered Mark to port content on the wiki to Movable Type a few
>>> months earlier. At that time, Mark had very valid concerns - that MT
>>> does not offer key features required of a wiki. But that was MT4 and
>>> a re-evaluation of MT after the release of MT5 recently might be
>>> interesting.
>>>        
>>
>> I like MT (2 or 3 years ago) but am not familiar with recent versions --
>> can it be used like a Wiki?  I thought it was strictly blog software.
>>      
> Probably the strongest case for-or-against this idea is the fact that
> Movable Type appears to be using MediaWiki for their own wiki, instead
> of something based Movable Type.
>
> Movable Type has a number of features to support wiki-like work, but it
> is not designed to be a wiki and would likely require some significant
> modification to work this way. In it's favor:
>
>   - It's easy to install
>   - It has a beautiful UI, both on the public and admin sides
>   - It has basic "revisions" support built-in
>   - It supports many authentication methods
>   - It supports "Markdown" syntax for posts.
>
> Someone else mentioned having a shared authentication system that could
> be used both the mailing list and the wiki. That could be nice, but
> gets us into looking at a category of software that's more like "Google
> Groups", which supports the list/forum concept as well as a wiki.
>
> Something like Google Groups that was open source would certainly be
> nice.
>
>      Mark
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 12:56:09 -0700
> From: Mark Fuller<azfuller at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [cgiapp] Future of the wiki
> To: CGI Application<cgiapp at lists.openlib.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<d69cc4a61002021156r2d2cdcc5wf91a305b29794491 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Someone said:
>
>    
>> Something like Google Groups that was open source would certainly be
>> nice.
>>      
> I like phpbb. It's heavy, but it's the most widely used forum
> software. The older I get, the more I subscribe to the ancient Chinese
> proverb: 10 million flies can't be wrong.
>
> Phpbb can be integrated with mediaWiki, to have the kind of shared
> authentication I was talking about (participants gain wiki editing
> status after some number of posts and some amount of time, to guard
> against a spammer making 10 posts in one night just to spam the wiki).
>
> As far as guarding against forum spam (which is the only risk, leading
> up to validated users who are trusted to edit the wiki), I like a
> tiered approach:
>
> 1. Captcha devices which bots have about a 20% success rate with.
> 2. Custom profile fields or Q&A which bots aren't programmed to
> handle. (Change these occasionally to defeat bots that might be
> customized to handle this particular forum.).
> 3. Assign new forum members to the group "newly registered users"
> until they've made 5-10 normal posts over some minimum period of time.
> 4. For postings by members of "newly registered users," use
> blacklisting services like Akismet, Spam Karma II and Spam Assassin.
>    - These tools look at the "spamminess" of a post, and return true/false.
>    - If they report a post of spam, place the user in a group of
> "reported spammers" for moderator review.
>    - If the service gave a false positive, report it to the service (to
> make the service better), and take the user out of the suspected
> group.
>    - The result is only a few undetected spam postings for moderators
> to remove, and report to the service to improve its accuracy.
> 5. After a participant makes it through that process, they're added to
> the phpbb group "wiki editors" (which is required for them to be
> recognized as authenticated at the wiki, along with the site cookie
> indicating they're authenticated.).
>
> Personally, I'd do this on the same host as the wiki. Not Google
> Groups. Keep it together, and integrated so the two distinct
> categories of collaboration drive participants/visitors to each other.
>
> As I said before, maybe the above is overkill for the size of C::A's
> following. Or, maybe C::A's following would grow if it moved to
> something more feature-rich than a "mailing list." Something where a
> user can see their posts, unread posts, unreplied posts, receive an
> email notification when a forum has been updated. See new posts via
> RSS/Atom feeds.
>
> It's even possible to create a forum for Wiki changes, and feed
> updates (diff output) to that forum as a topic for each page. Changes
> to the Wiki would be more visible as people participate in the other
> (normal) forums. And, they could watch that forum using RSS, like any
> other forum. (This duplicates mediaWiki's own features. But, it helps
> visibility when many people aren't going to visit the wiki often just
> to see what's happening.).
>
> Mark
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2010 09:53:40 +1100
> From: Cees Hek<ceeshek at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [cgiapp] Future of the wiki
> To: CGI Application<cgiapp at lists.openlib.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<fd8e28ef1002021453h682fa370tffc09f0d0ddf4d2a at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 7:29 PM, Mark Fuller<azfuller at gmail.com>  wrote:
>    
>> Mailing lists seem so 1990. I'd ditch it and go with a forum.
>>      
> A forum requires me to actively participate (ie go to the forum every
> day to see what is there).  A mailing list allows me to passively keep
> in touch since I check my email regularly throughout the day.  I don't
> read every message on the list, but I at least see the subjects and
> look at the stuff that interests me.
>
> I think switching to a forum would loose a lot of lurkers on this list...
>
> Cheers,
>
> Cees
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2010 09:59:13 +1100
> From: Stewart Heckenberg<stewart.heckenberg at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [cgiapp] Future of the wiki
> To: CGI Application<cgiapp at lists.openlib.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<45ba9f351002021459w4e359f43p67805e0b4f087ca5 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> I quite enjoy lurking :)
>
> (hey Cees!)
>
> Stew
>
> On 3 February 2010 09:53, Cees Hek<ceeshek at gmail.com>  wrote:
>    
>> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 7:29 PM, Mark Fuller<azfuller at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>      
>>> Mailing lists seem so 1990. I'd ditch it and go with a forum.
>>>        
>> A forum requires me to actively participate (ie go to the forum every
>> day to see what is there). ?A mailing list allows me to passively keep
>> in touch since I check my email regularly throughout the day. ?I don't
>> read every message on the list, but I at least see the subjects and
>> look at the stuff that interests me.
>>
>> I think switching to a forum would loose a lot of lurkers on this list...
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Cees
>>
>> ##### ?CGI::Application community mailing list ?################
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>> ################################################################
>>
>>
>>      
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 17:08:24 -0600
> From: P Kishor<punk.kish at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [cgiapp] Future of the wiki
> To: CGI Application<cgiapp at lists.openlib.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<cdf6db501002021508k4b868e57pb2160c9a990bd5e at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 4:53 PM, Cees Hek<ceeshek at gmail.com>  wrote:
>    
>> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 7:29 PM, Mark Fuller<azfuller at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>      
>>> Mailing lists seem so 1990. I'd ditch it and go with a forum.
>>>        
>> A forum requires me to actively participate (ie go to the forum every
>> day to see what is there). ?A mailing list allows me to passively keep
>> in touch since I check my email regularly throughout the day. ?I don't
>> read every message on the list, but I at least see the subjects and
>> look at the stuff that interests me.
>>
>> I think switching to a forum would loose a lot of lurkers on this list...
>>
>>      
>
> Right. The old debate, and never the twain shall meet. Or, won't they?
> There are some web based forums (and, if there aren't, we could build
> one, hey!) that allow checking on the web, or subscribing to selected
> threads or all threads so responses to threads also get emailed. Best
> of both worlds. And, since they are designed for web-based consumption
> as well, they have much nicer interface than, say, searching via
> mailing list archives. On the other hand, tools such as nabble and
> mark mail allow one to webify existing mailing lists, so we may not be
> far off from a solution.
>
> But, we digress... how about modernizing cgi-app and still retaining
> its wiki-ness?
>
> Puneet.
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:20:54 +0000
> From: Lyle<webmaster at cosmicperl.com>
> Subject: Re: [cgiapp] Future of the wiki
> To: CGI Application<cgiapp at lists.openlib.org>
> Message-ID:<4B68C166.4030902 at cosmicperl.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Mark Fuller wrote:
>    
>> Someone said:
>>
>>
>>      
>>> Something like Google Groups that was open source would certainly be
>>> nice.
>>>
>>>        
>> I like phpbb. It's heavy, but it's the most widely used forum
>> software. The older I get, the more I subscribe to the ancient Chinese
>> proverb: 10 million flies can't be wrong.
>>
>>      
> I personally loathe Perl sites that use PHP.
>
>
> Lyle
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 18:29:12 -0600
> From: P Kishor<punk.kish at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [cgiapp] Future of the wiki
> To: CGI Application<cgiapp at lists.openlib.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<cdf6db501002021629w79b3db8bo18389ba6ad5efd4d at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Lyle<webmaster at cosmicperl.com>  wrote:
>    
>> Mark Fuller wrote:
>>      
>>> Someone said:
>>>
>>>
>>>        
>>>> Something like Google Groups that was open source would certainly be
>>>> nice.
>>>>
>>>>          
>>> I like phpbb. It's heavy, but it's the most widely used forum
>>> software. The older I get, the more I subscribe to the ancient Chinese
>>> proverb: 10 million flies can't be wrong.
>>>
>>>        
>> I personally loathe Perl sites that use PHP.
>>
>>
>>      
>
> Yea, I concur. And 99% of PHP sites are ugly to boot. In fact, even
> Perl-based sites are almost always nicer looking than PHP. ;-)
>
> Actually, a cgi-app based wiki that is light-weight, using flat files
> or sqlite as the backend, and jQuery on the front end, with JSON for
> data back-and-forth, and a modular design would be a really nice
> development. As mentioned earlier, there is already a CGI::Wiki that
> has now morphed into Wiki::Toolkit. I am not sure how well used or
> maintained it is... might be a nice base to start with, although I
> wonder why its name was change... keeping in with the philosophy of
> cgi plugins, a CGI::Application::Plugin::Wiki and an optional
> CGI::Application::Plugin::Forum and CGI::Application::Plugin::Blog
> would be great. Recaptcha could be used for stopping spammers.
>
>
>
>
>    