A Wiki in my Serendipity Blog

Creating and modifying plugins.
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TimothyP
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A Wiki in my Serendipity Blog

Post by TimothyP »

I'd be grateful for comments or suggestions for the Wiki plugin I'm most of the way through developing for serendipity. It currently has the following functions:

- Allow import from wiki sources, currently only voodoopad the desktop wiki editor for the mac, but easily extended.
- Creates static pages from wiki content
- Manages separate groups of aliases. Aliases here being keywords, phrases or regexps, linking to either wiki content (a static page), or any other URL (an entry, an external site). Aliases can be edited, added, and of course imported from an existing link structure.
- Allows the application of aliases to both the static pages generated by the wiki, and, most interestingly, across your main serendipity entries. Wherever an alias is matched, a link is inserted, enriching the content and link structure of your blog.

To sum up with a use case, this means I can manage a wiki of content in voodoopad (e.g. describing a particular field of interest related to my blog), export it to my blog, and then automatically apply links across my entries and the static content. The additional content is completely integrated with my blog's appearance thanks to use of the static page plugin.


Aliases are managed by marking links inserted by the wiki plugin, allowing them to also be removed. Existing links in text are ignored, as are urls or html tags. I'm open to suggestion about how to avoid corruption of other forms of markup in serendipity entries.

Availability of the first version of the plugin will be announced on my blog
Tim Putnam
Between the devil and the deep blue sea
http://deepbluesea.fracsoft.com/
mdnava
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Test drive!!

Post by mdnava »

I look forward to test drive it!
Melvin D. Nava
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Sblanco
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Post by Sblanco »

Hi Tim

I'm a professor in a Communication University and your plugin sounds very interesting.

I'm not an expert in managing wikis but would like to know if you plug in could consider restricter access for some articles, for example, an article that is wrotten by 2 or 3 authors for a Congress.

Thanks in advance :)
TimothyP
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'

Post by TimothyP »

see below
Last edited by TimothyP on Wed Jul 06, 2005 6:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Tim Putnam
Between the devil and the deep blue sea
http://deepbluesea.fracsoft.com/
TimothyP
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Restricting access to wiki content

Post by TimothyP »

Sblanco wrote:
I'm not an expert in managing wikis but would like to know if you plug in could consider restricter access for some articles, for example, an article that is wrotten by 2 or 3 authors for a Congress.
I'm no expert either :) but I see what you're getting at, it raises some interesting points. I guess you are suggesting using serendipity as the editing platform for wiki content:

- Using the static page plugin means access to editing that content depends on the access control features of that plugin. I'm not sure what they are but I will find out. If this is insufficient, I can replicate this functionality within the wiki plugin.
- A controlled list of authors could be given access rights to the wiki itself. This will limit who can change aliases, and *import* content.

To control access over a single page is more interesting, and suggests a different approach. Serendipity is not a wiki, but rather is being used to present information developed in a wiki. Therefore:

1) Only the administrator and authors of the blog can access the wiki plugin and import or edit content (most sensible)
2) Access to editing resources in the remote wiki before import is therefore relied upon for the functionality you mentioned.

In addition to this, you will be able to edit resources in serendipity, subject to serendipity's author controls.

If you use VoodooPad as a desktop wiki (and thats the only one I import from at the moment, others can be added), you would control access of authors by changing permissions on the .vdoc file. You could then simply update all changes to the content by importing using this plugin.

Thanks for the useful comments, I hadn't thought about this in detail before. Please feel free to email me and we could discuss it further. I'm busily trying to get the plugin in a state for trying out but have a deadline for my phd transfer report to worry about first :)

Cheers,
Tim
Tim Putnam
Between the devil and the deep blue sea
http://deepbluesea.fracsoft.com/
TimothyP
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Up for testing

Post by TimothyP »

I finally got a spare moment and have a basic version ready. No documentation, have a play and see what you get. Best results, use VoodooPad on the mac to import. However, you can create your own content too.

Please be careful not to ruin your entries contents with the "write wiki aliases to entries" feature. I've used it, and its worked, but remember its untested!! Backup :)

Currently only available from my blog http://fracsoft.com/serendipity/archive ... lugin.html
Tim Putnam
Between the devil and the deep blue sea
http://deepbluesea.fracsoft.com/
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