[cgiapp] Future of the wiki

[Mark Rajcok]

My 2 cents about the CGI-App wiki.

I recently halted development on my app to learn about Unicode and UTF-8
(and I guess I also ended up learning about character encodings in general
-- wow, did I miss some important training somewhere in my past).

As usual, I found many good discussions in the CGI-App mail archive (thank
you all) but nothing on the wiki.  I decided I would spend a few hours and
put a summary together of what I learned.  I decided against putting it on
the CGI-App wiki for the following reasons (i.e., lack of features):

1. no automatic table of contents generation (visit
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Perl_Programming/Unicode_UTF-8 and you'll see
why this was important)
2. no ability to edit small sections of a page

Some other nice features about wikibooks
- source code highlighting
- discussion page

(I did put a link on the CGI-App wiki to the Wikibooks doc, so if someone
searches for Unicode or UTF-8, something will show up.)

I don't think we should write a CGI-App-based wiki for the following
reasons:

1. It will never have the feature set of other wikis, which means that
probably no one else would ever use this wiki except us.

2. Regarding "it would be a good CGI-App sample app for people to look at
and learn from" -- there are already some sample apps out there that people
can look at.  I don't think we need a wiki sample reference app.  If we're
going to collectively build a new sample/reference app, how about something
more interesting -- like a social networking site/framework.

3. It won't see the light of day for months... this is the 2nd or 3rd time
this was discussed, and I didn't see any marching orders materialize from
this thread yet...

Regarding the current wiki, I think a few simple changes would make it look
a lot better:
- set the default font size (to something smaller)
- use something other than verdana for the headings (that font looks bad
large)
- lighten the dark black border around the main content -- it is too dark --
make it a little lighter, and add a CSS3 shadow to it or the left pane for a
little spice (don't worry if it doesn't show on IE).

I think the biggest problem with the current wiki is that most people don't
contribute to it much.  There is a wealth of info in the archives that I
would really like to see digested and put on the wiki -- but that takes time
that most of us don't have.

In summary, I'd rather switch to a more feature rich wiki (I don't care if
it's written in Perl), and have all of the people who were willing to spend
time writing a new CGI-App-based wiki instead spend their time writing a
more useful reference app, or write some useful pages on the new wiki!

-- Mark R.