===== RobinW =====

I'm running Wikka at [[http://www.wickit.be/ | WickIT]], a dutch IT-wiki. I live in Belgium and I fluently speak Dutch and English, pretty good French and a bit of German.

==== My experiences with Wikka ====

Like a lot of users I first tried MediaWiki. I found it was too hard to hack the code and to integrate a forum with it. "Nontroppo" told me he used Wikka for [[http://nontroppo.org/wiki/Opera | his Opera wiki]], which seemed very customizable. So, here I am. :)

==== Possible improvements ====

This is what I felt when I was customizing wikka for my site. The PHP-code is very nice written, very easy to understand. The only difficulties I ran into where the regular expressions, but that's not my specialty either.
I think the biggest improvement could be the default lay-out, the HTML and the CSS. The code is pretty OK and mostly valid HTML, but I ran into some weird stuff:

~- Spaces used for positioning elements.
~- Tables for lay-outing.
~- The "::" and "[]"-thingies. It seems to me that a lot of wiki's do this, I don't know why, but I think it makes everything look a bit messy. It's better if you use lists (##<ul>##) for menu's and style them with CSS.
Those are just some examples. :)

I also felt that the wiki-specific stuff is a bit hidden at the bottom of the page, so I put up a HUGE "Edit" button in the right corner of mine. :) Also the search box should be more of an eye-catcher.

==== 100% safe e-mail adresses ====

I wrote a simple action which converts text to a (non clickable) image. The width of the image gets adjusted to its content and a ""TrueType""-font can be used. You can find the script at http://www.wickit.be/wiki/VeiligeEmailadressenMetPHP#afbeelding. (Dont't mind the Dutch text, if you know PHP, it pretty much explains itself.)

==== Acronyms ====

I also wrote an ##<acronym>##-convertor. I couldn't find a working example on this site that uses a wikipage to add new acronyms. I did the same with my InterWiki list.
I basicly did something like this in ##wikka.php##:

%%(php)
$acroPage = $this->LoadPage('WikiAcronyms');
$this->acronyms = array();

$line = 0;
$pagelines = explode ("\n", $acroPage["body"]);

for ($i = 0; $i < count ($pagelines); $i++) {
if (preg_match ("/[ ~]*-(.*)/",$pagelines[$i],$matches)) {
if (!strstr($matches[1],'---'))
$temp = explode(' = ',str_replace(' - ','',$matches[1]));
if (!empty($temp[0]))
$this->acronyms[trim($temp[0])] = str_replace('""','',$temp[1]);
}
}%%
This loads all the acronyms from a page which has all the acronyms in a list (with four spaces and a dash before them) and ignores all lines containing three dashes (a forced line-break).
Then I adjusted the Wakka formatter to match ""??acronyms??"" and to load them from the array.
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CategoryUsers