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This is an old revision of SuggestionBox made by JavaWoman on 2005-04-13 18:46:32.

 

Suggestion Box

Last edited by JavaWoman:
adding link to archive
Wed, 13 Apr 2005 18:46 UTC [diff]


Feedback is welcomed and appreciated. Use the form or edit this page.

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Bugs vs. feature suggestions

Please post issues/bugs to the appropriate page:
See also:

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Global Access Control Lists

How about a global ACL that allows you to pick a prefix to a wikka word that automatically has an ACL applied? E.g. PrivatePage1, PrivatePage2 -- so the word Private is the trigger, anything prefixed with that has an ACL applied. -- JeremyCoates

Editable header/footer

It is quite cumbersome to edit the header and footer at the moment.
Some of it has to be done in the actions files, and the menuitems in the config file. This means I can't safely allow users to edit them.
What I would like, is a system that allows easy creation of non-default headers/footers (so you can get a different menu in different parts of the site).
--OnkelJonas


Font action
I didn't know where to put this, so here goes.
I've been adapting a script that uses GD to make an image of some text using a specified font. I'll post it at FontActionInfo

BTW - The work you've done - especially with CSS styling - is very, very good. Keep it up ;-)



Color Formatting

The current color formatting isn't very wiki like. Altho i can see how {{}} fits with wikka formatting style, text color is something i see myself using more often than tables. so here's the suggestion...
^<color> text^

this regex syntax is lifted from a UseMod Wiki patch.
s/\^([a-zA-Z]{1,}|#[0-9A-Fa-f]{6}) (.*?)\^/<span style="color:$1;">$2<\/span>/

I am by NO means a regex expert, but it seems that this should do the deal... I'm just not sure where it would go. By using style here, you can use #0000ff, #00f, as well as just blue or any other html defined color name.
--MonstoBrukes



Integration into existing site

plus more on non-wikiname formatted usernames
I'm trying to integrate wikka into an existing site auth system. I have wikka already successfully running with the includes of my main site, thus requiring main site login to access the wiki. i fig the best way to deal with wikka logins is to read the main sites "current user" info. when someone access' the wiki for the first time, their username obviously won't exist in the wikka userdb, so rather than making them create a login, i'll want to quietly query it into the wikka db. the problem is that wikka depends on wikiname formatted names. I don't care if people have their own page (may have it for a special few) password resets won't be an issue as stated below. While we may use comments (on the pages for the special few) they will prob remain off.

I'd like to do this as above to keep vandalism down. I've got almost 200k members and i know there are some jokers just waiting to anon deface crap just cuz they can. With an auto login like this, showing ppl their username as soon as they hit the wiki, it'll immediately cut that factor.
-- MonstoBrukes

-- KiltanneN


Documentation

Documentation on the site here seems . . . fragmented I think is the best word. Admin features are the example i'll use cuz it was my big hurdle. At this point I've only been able to find that the account created at install is THE admin, and as site owner i should give access to that account to the people that i want to admin the site. Is there more to it than this?


Searching for "Admin Features" yeilds over 100 entries. There's nothing in CategoryDocumentation detailing admin features, and the page WikkaFeatures mentions several admin features that have neither further explanation nor links.


On top of all this, searching ACL reveals one page that just mentions ACL more in passing. The page with Category instructions is also a little under informed. You'd think that after following 2 step instructions that it'd work.


This page is another example. I started reading it the other night looking for something specific but by the time i finished reading it, i had about 6 different things i felt like commenting on. It's so long tho that i felt my comments would be missed so i didn't bother. Rather than piled on one after the other, after a certain age, each of these subjects should be broken off to their own page in a CategorySuggestionBox and listed here. (I mean this is a wiki and space isn't necessarily at a premium) This would make it easier to find and contribute to a specific topic. If a search produces this page as a result, the initial impression is that the search was really messed up hitting "suggestionbox" with my search terms.

Anyway... the suggestion? Organizing documentation should be THE priority. This site looks quite nice. It's a shining example of how wikka works when beat into perfect shape. But the site I installed looked and acted nothing like this...


-- KiltanneN



Pages linking to nonexisting pages

As MovieLady pointed out somewhere, it could be usefull to see if there are pages linking to a non existing page (for example when you have renamed the page and have to update the links).

The following solution just prints out the links, without any other text ("the following pages link here") - which should be better placed in the backlinks action.

Change in handlers/page/show.php the lines with if (!this->page) to:
  1.     if (!$this->page)
  2.     {
  3.         print("<p>This page doesn't exist yet. Maybe you want to <a href=\"".$this->Href("edit")."\">create</a> it?</p>");
  4.         print $this->Action("backlinks")."</div>";
  5.     }



Sending 403 headers

(related to the Search engine results inflation item below)

For pages to which the user has no read-access, do you think it might be feasible/interesting to send - along with the You aren't allowed to read this page message - a HTTP header like the following:
 header('HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden');

-- DarTar

Numbers as page names?

I'm curious about the Wikka convention that numbers cannot be page names. I'd like to be able to create "date page" (e.g. 2005-02-26) for notes and journaling, so this is a feature I'd definitely suggest.

BTW, doing something along the lines of "journal/2005-02-26" or "journal_2005..." wants to create an external link.

Thx, RobertDaeley


Configurable name for Wikka engine

I think it might be interesting for many of our users if we gave the possibility - in the install/upgrade wizard - to rename the engine from wikka.php to something else (for instance, index.php). This might be useful in cases where RR are off and the user wants to avoid long URLs: http://www.mydomain.com/wiki/wikka.php?wakka=HomePage can then become http://www.mydomain.com/wiki/?wakka=HomePage. The name should be specified as an option in wikka.config.php, for instance

 "wikka_engine" => "wikka.php", 


This option might also allow using different engines (say, different versions of wikka.php) on the same installation.
-- DarTar


Search engine results inflation

I have recently installed Wikka on my personal website. Everything works fine, except that the TextSearch link in the page header (which I masked through CSS - I don't want to hack the code) produces dozens of search results that I really don't want to be cached on Google. Same story applies to the revisions and history links that are cached on search engines: this is what happens in the case of our main server. I'd also would like to avoid default wiki pages (like SandBox, MyPages, UserSettings etc.) to be crawled and cached (simply setting ACLs to !*-!*-!* won't do the job). Maybe we should think of a way to allow the user to decide what kind of content of her Wikka-powered site should be spidered by SE and what content should not. -- DarTar


For Better Overview

1. It often takes too much time to check if a wiki has changed and what has changed. In the case of wikkawiki one has to check RecentChanges as well as RecentlyCommented. A combined page would be more convenient - RicharD

Generate page from an external database

As described in DynamicPageGeneration I'd like to create a mailling-like system to fill in pages containig custom fields with data from an external database or a simple table. This could be done through a few actions or by writing a new handler.
This idea can be extended to an inline editor to add/remove/edit entries in this external table if wikka store creditentials with write access in its own tables.
The main goal is to integrate data from an existing knoweldge base in a wikka based documentation repository.

DotMG insists about favicon.ico and robots.txt

Please add the following two lines to ./.htaccess
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/favicon.ico
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/robots.txt
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ wikka.php?wakka=$1 [QSA,L]
This will prevent /favicon.ico and /robots.txt from being redirected to wikka.php?wakka=favicon.ico
With these 2 lines, we don't have to modify wikka.php as suggested in FaviconDotIco --DotMG

Section Editing Redux

Instead of a full blown section editing implementation why not just implement a tag like '<WikiPage>' which inserts the contents of WikiPage (no comments) at the markers location. <WikiPage x> would insert the first x lines of the WikiPage into the current page. And/or <WikiPage Header> would pull just the section of the page which is demarked by Header and EOP or next header. Such sections can be inserted in a special color/block/font/whatever and automatically link back to the original page for editing. The goal is to provide better editing granularity and readability on pages which have lots of information density. Could also be used to mimic blog functionality. -KarmaTester

Category Icons

Create a table which maintains a mapping between wikka categories and an associated predefined icon graphic. When the directive {category_icon} is used the category's icon is dropped into the page at the location of invocation. -KarmaTester






Robot Friendly Pages


Right now (1.1.6.0), if a non-existant page is requested, the wiki returns status code 200, which will cause the page to be indexed by search engine spiders. It'd probably be better to return 404 (not found) or 410 (gone) or include robots exclusion meta tags in the pages that don't exist. --BarkerJr


Kant-en-klaar code blocks


A micro-idea before going to bed. We all know it's a bad idea to copy code blocks from the formatted version of a page.
If I want to test some freshly posted code, here's what I have to do:
  1. open a /raw version of the page;
  1. scan the page for the chunk of code I want to save (this can be pretty difficult on long source pages with no syntax highlighting);
  1. open a text editor;
  1. copy the code block;
  1. paste it in the text editor;
  1. save the file.

Wouldn't it be nice to have at the end of each code block a small link pointing to a handler allowing the user to download the code block with the right name and the right extension just with one click?

See GrabCodeHandler for a first proposal -- DarTar



Security Verification Test from Wikini

On the top of most page handlers, the Wikini developers have:
// Vérification de sécurité
if (!defined("WIKINI_VERSION"))
{
die ("accès direct interdit");
}

I'm not sure what exactly this does, can anyone enlighten me; and if it is a good idea, then it should considered for Wikka too... --IanAndolina



mod_rewrite idea (.htaccess)

(The following was copied from a comment on ModRewrite -- JavaWoman)
Hi, I discovered that the default .htaccess included did not work for my setup up. I needed to include RewriteBase /directory/ as well since Wikka is installed in a subdirectory. I hope this helps anyone having trouble getting Wikka to work.
-- h-67-102-97-191.mclnva23.covad.net (2005-02-11 04:49:37)

The installer correctly deduces the base path for the configuration; it could conceivably also detect if it's sitting in a subdirectory, and if so, dynamically change the .htaccess file and include the correct RewriteBase statement to take care of this. --JavaWoman



Separation of Wakka class from wikka.php

I use wikka as wiki engine of my page.
IMO, the wikka.php file is too big to be one single file. I suggest that we separate the Wakka class into new file, say Wakka.class.php
And then in the wikka.php, e.g at line where the Wakka class previously located, simply we put:
include ('Wakka.class.php');

-- DiN



phpMyEdit in Wikka


I've set up a demo of phpMyEdit running within Wikka. This would be useful for anyone wanting to directly interact with MySQL tables from a Wikka page. -- JsnX


Inherit ACL from 'parents'

Create a page and when creating a page from there, give the option to copy the ACL of the first page.
Should pages be linked in some form to some documents given the fact that Wikka is flat, not hierarchic.
ForTheLazy - chatlog and summary.
-- FreekNL
See also HierarchiesAndInheritance for some background --JavaWoman



Paragraph instead of line-breaks

(copied from WhatsNew -- DarTar)
Why is it that the formatter creates line breaks instead of paragraphs? I've been trying to figure out a way to get Wikka to do this, but it may be nice for there to be some sort of option in a future release. Paragraphs tend to be more useful for doing CSS formatting.
-- ScumBle

+1 — semantically, Wikka's current lack of proper paragraphs and liberal sprinkling of line breaks is really undesirble. I made a hack-mod on my wakka some time ago in formatter/wakka.php (just after the preg_replace_callback):

$pattern2 = "/^(\040|\t)*(?!<|\040)(.+)$/m"; //matches any line with no <element> (and variable leading space) - assume a paragraph
$replace2 = "<p>\\2</p>";
$text=preg_replace($pattern2,$replace2,$text);

$pattern1 = "/^(\040|\t)*(<(?!hr|(\/|)h[1-6]|br|(\/|)li|(\/|)[uo]l|(\/|)div|(\/|)p).*)$/m"; //matches any <element>text lines not considered block formatting
$replace1 = "<p>\\2</p>";
$text=preg_replace($pattern1,$replace1,$text);


I don't know how that will affect wikka (it was designed for my formatting which is different to wikka slightly), and there is probably a much better way to do it (call a post-formatter?), but it is possible using a small modification at least... --IanAndolina



Save Pages to PDF Format

(copied from WikkaDevelopment --Nils)
Page output to an Adobe pdf file using FPDF.
E-mail this page facility
--JamesMcl


Usergroups

(copied from WikkaDevelopment --Nils)
Yet another idea from me:
Usergroups. So i can create a group of users, and just write that group into the ACLs...
- Take a look at GroupManagement (which doesn't seem to be finished) - or at ACLsWithUserGroups.


"In work" for Wikka-pages

(copied from WikkaDevelopment --Nils)
Add a page property, 'Status' [?] that can be used to facilitate code development within Wikka. Imagine a very basic CVS system. A user can change the status to "In use' while considering improvements to the code, and then change it to 'Available' when done. This may prevent this scenario:
OR



Searching (in) comments

(copied from WikkaDevelopment --Nils)
Add the ability to 'search for all comments by user X'. How this might be useful: I want to find a comment by JavaWoman (really?), but I can't remember which page it was on -- she's quite prolific! -- (I admit I'm easily distracted. What am I doing here, now!? :)) so I use this new function to list all of her comments.


(copied from WikkaDevelopment --Nils)
It would be good if the text-search would be sorted in some way. If I search for example for "GmBowen", a page with the exact match (his userpage) should be on the top of the results. The next results perhaps in alphabetical order? --NilsLindenberg


Highlight unseen Recentchanges

(copied from WikkaDevelopment --NilsLindenberg)
Add fields to the 'users' table [?] to track when RecentChanges and RecentlyCommented were last viewed. Then RecentChanges and RecentlyCommented can by modified to highlight new items since the user last viewed the page.


Is there a way to include a target in a link, so that the Link opens in a new window?
--GregorLindner


Signature
(copied from WikkaFaq, but perhaps better at WantedFormatters? --NilsLindenberg)
Does Wikka support automatic user signatures in pages (not comments)? I need some code so that users don't need to enter their username and time/date when they are working on a page in ThreadMode. I've searched in the docs, but I could not find anything about this, any ideas?
-- JeroenJansen (2005-01-28 11:35:43)



Most wikis I have set up have the need for a page containing a list of links. It would be great if Wikka could support this in some way - such as providing an easy way of adding links to a configured page. One way of doing this could be a simple Java Scriptlet that you configure with the address of the link page. Then, you mark a link in a web-page, click on the scriptlet, enter a short description and bang - the link is added to the wiki page.
The del.icio.us page offers some user contributed hacks which may be a starting point.

MatthewLangham

Create rewrite rules on install
copied from comment on WikkaInstallation --JavaWoman
Since I installed wikka in a subdirectory under the domain root I needed to add the following to the .htaccess file just under "RewriteEngine on":

RewriteBase /subdirectory/

Devs, how about writing the .htaccess rules at the same time you write out the wikka.config.php file since you automatically pickup the wiki base location at that point?

-kt
-- KarmaTester (2005-01-26 06:52:07)


Image dimensions

The AddingImages image action really needs the ability to specify image height and width. :) --MovieLady
Dear all: see my proposal at EnhancedImageAction


Clearing ACLs

There should be a button on the ACL page to "Reset ACLs to Default". What this would do is delete the record for the current page from the acls table. There is a distinction between setting the ACLs to the sites default values and not having ACLs defined for a page. If the ACLs are set and the default values get changed, the page will remain at the set values. However, if no ACLs are defined, the page will always use the default values.

To help show the distinction, there should be a visual indicator on the ACL handler page which states whether the page has ACLs defined or is using the site's default values. Basically, just check for a record in the acls table for the current page, and display a message accordingly. -- JsnX

User registration control
It would nice to have the registration function check to make sure there isn't another account with the same email already registered so that one person doesn't clutter up the db with multiple accounts. (Or at least the configurable option to check for only one email/one account.)

It should also then be easier (I would think) to use it to essentially ban by email address; if the registration process checked for an email in the user table, found that it was already in use and didn't let the person create a new username, one could use the wonderful ACLsWithUserGroups hack that Christian created to make a list of banned users by username. Yeah, yeah, folks who want to abuse the system could always create new email addresses on the various free sites, but that's an awful lot of work, and this would at least slow down some of it. --MovieLady




RSS options

It would be wonderful to be able to choose what kind of RSS feed is created for a page. For example, {{rss}}/{{rss show="1"}} could show only the headlines and the update field (current setting), {{rss show="2"}} could show a blurb of the updated info, {{rss show="3"}} could show the whole update. --MovieLady


Embed a blurb from a news page into another page?

I currently have no idea how one would approach this, but thought I'd toss it out there for others to think over. I would find it really useful to have an announcement action (maybe {{news}}?) that I could use which displays only the most recent (configurable) number (e.g. {{news show="2"}} would show the most recent two entries from the page) of entries from a specific (configurable or static?) page. Right now I do this by hand, adding the current announcement to both the front page and the news archive page (so I'll have a history of the announcements), and boy, what a pita! What I'd like to be able to do is just edit the news page and have it automatically update what displays in the news area on the front page. Possible, or am I smoking something I need to share? ;) --MovieLady


Logging-out
Perhaps the installer should tell the user that he will be logged-out (because of the new cookie-names). Would be nicer. Btw, the /setup directory needs an update (or better the files in it). --NilsLindenberg



It would be wonderful to have the option to display the results of the {{backlinks}} action in columns, similar to what {{Category col="3"}} allows you to do. --MovieLady


Language file
I would be nice to see all phrases put into a single file. This would allow to translate the wiki in a few hours without changes every single file.


User names

Is there any likelihood of non-wikiname usernames (e.g. Movielady) in the future? It's one of the things I've been asked a lot by the users of the site I use Wikka for. (Most often heard comment: "but other wikis I've used let me do it!") Obviously it's possible to create non-wikiname pages, so why not usernames? (I have looked on the site, but I've probably missed the explanation.)

I also agree with Nils that it would be really wonderful if some sort of default user page was created when a person creates an account.

Y'all are doing a marvelous job, BTW and it is greatly appreciated! :) (I will try to contribute as I can, but honestly, some of the programming is beyond me at the moment.) --MovieLady

I actually hacked UserSettings.php to allow for non-wikinames. Just change lines such as 152 and 179 from:
if (!$this->IsWikiName($name)) $error = "User name must be WikiName formatted!";

to something like:
if(false);

Then modify header.php so that the username is Wikified. So change a certain line (I modified my Wikka so much that I can't give accurate lines) to:
echo "You are ".$this->Link($this->GetUserName());

I'm not sure how well this will work in the long run, but it worked for me!
-- MikeXstudios



Finally using CVS?
I apologize since this idea has been suggested before, and I believe the developers are working to implement it already. However, with the beta of 1.1.6.0 released, I think it would be a good time now to start using CVS. This allows for better collaboration and as each bug fix or feature is implemented, developers and testers can grab new copies and work out further bugs. In addition, this allows more outsiders to participate in the code development process and not wait as long from the transition of releases.

Also, I am willing to help with the CVS migration process if needed and help anyone who is interested in learning how to use CVS.
-- MikeXstudios


List of special actions?
A complete reference list of all the special actions (e.g. {{nocomments}}, {{Category}}, etc.) would be really nice. --MovieLady



Allow spaces in pagetitle
Allow Spaces in the document title and replace it later with "-" to optimize it for search engines.


User-defined formatting rules
It would be nice if Wikka supported some way to add in user defined wikki formatting rules (that is, without editing ./formatters/wakka.php). Not sure what that would look like. A few thoughts I've had:
--KickTheDonkey


It would be nice if a link to the same host as the wikka install was not flagged as 'external'. I've added a 'hack' to my personal page: KickTheDonkey. Works fine here.
--KickTheDonkey


Compile Category action
A "compile category" action. Right now, if I go to CategoryDocumentation I can see a list of all of the pages in this category...but it still requires a lot of snooping to find what I want. As an administrator I'd like to provide a pdf "booklet" of all of that output for users to download. To make this now would mean going to and printing each and every page (using a software tool, TO a pdf file). Ugh. An action that let me go {{compile category="CategoryDocumentation"}} to generate a single web page of all of that documentation would be quite useful because then I could just print it to a pdf file once.....then I could provide a link to the PDF file so users could download it and print it off.


Section Editing





Compatibility & Installer
(Copied from comment on WikkaInstallation, I support this proposal - and agree that @ in front of a statement should generally be avoided, unless any errors are actually dealt with. (Layout slightly adapted.) --JavaWoman)

IMPORTANT: installer uses TOO MUCH "@" before all mysql calls...
-- 213-140-6-98.fastres.net

- Compatibility-problem is solved now, text moved below to Resolved Suggestions->Compatibility with PHP 4.1.x) --NilsLindenberg


Handling the config
I have three questions about the config. See HandlingWikkaConfig.
--NilsLindenberg
See also WikkaSecureConfig for a possible new appraoch. --JavaWoman


Markup for code not to be shown
I read this suggestion elsewhere (not in wikka I don't think...some other wiki I think) and didn't think anything about it at the time, but now with the showpagecode action (Mod042fShowPageCodeHandler) am thinking that maybe some wiki markup for "comment text" that is not shown by the code interpreter might be useful (in other words, visible when editing the page, visible when showing the code, NOT visible when just viewing page). I suspect it might be simple to add this....am I wrong?? -- GmBowen (Mike)
Essentially you can already do this -- well, mostly -- since Wikka supports HTML markup: just enclose the element to be hidden in HTML (SGML) comments: <!-- at the start and --> at the end, and then mark the whole as being HTML. One gotcha: the content between inside the comment declaration cannot itself contain a double dash (hyphen) since that would terminate the comment. And a proviso: HTML should be enabled. --JavaWoman
I played with this a little and did a modification of formatters/wakka.php (see here) that got rid of monospace and replaced it with the comment brackets. It works okay, although it does leave a blank line in the code. I tried making my own format within that code (using ^^) and got nowhere....but what I did works okay. Thanks for your feedback...it provided info I needed to do the change in the wakka file. -- Mike
But why make a modification at all? HTML is already supported. Do you see the commented out text? It's right here in my reply; edit the page to see it. :) --JavaWoman
Ha...I learned something here....I didn't have HTML turned on in the config file (oops!)....however, one thing to remember is that I'm dealing with a different "audience" for using this wikka tool (13-18 year olds, many not computer literate at all, and who would be completely alienated by even thinking about using html...although maybe not all that different from an "average" user) and I'm trying to have it as useable as possible for them. For that group, there's a big difference between typing ## twice when they might want to add a comment they don't want anyone else to see as they're reading the document, like a thought they don't want to forget, and having to remember BOTH of "<!--" AND "-->" (with the double quotes remember). From a useability perspective the latter is a LOT more difficult, and therefore students would be much less likely to use it (altho' the ability to drop in quick notes would be quite useful to the writing process....like I use the post it boxes in MSWord). Imagine them writing an essay that they want comments back on from the teacher or other students. They would never put "off-topic commentary" (to remind themselves of a reference, etc) into the overall "visible" body in a way that you and I might (it runs completely against how students write in school culture)...although such personal sorts of comments might be really useful when re-editing the document. My overall schtick is trying to provide a scaffolding of use so that complete newbies can better proceed to more sophisticated usage...and part of how I do this is considering the culture they work in and how they use similar tools in the context that I'm interested in them using the wiki....which is what many of my comments and additions here are all about eh. ; ) I agree though that for my useage, and for your useage, what you're suggesting makes complete sense....and besides, why do we need monospace anyways?? {grin} -- Mike
Ah, yes, I see your point about the "available" commenting method being unusable for your (and similar) audience. (One could possibly extend the WikeEdit toolbar to provide an easy "commenting out" action though) On the other hand, maybe you don't need monospace, but I, often writing about code (and planning Wikis where users would do the same), need it all the time: I use it as a "fake" inline code markup (see my new JwCalendar page for an example :)); real inline code markup might be nice, of course, but I still wouldn't want to give up monospace markup! So, I'd suggest a choosing different set of characters (possibly a combination of two different characters, we're fast running out of candidates!). --JavaWoman
My, uh, comment on monospace was a "poking fun" "tongue in cheek" kind of comment (meant in the kindest possible ways) that programmers use monospace a lot (which is probably why it's there), whereas non-computer sorts don't.....my (maniacal?) focus is on the latter groups eh? LOL. I did try to have code in formatters/page/wakka.php to add in ^^ as code for commenting, but I couldn't get it working...which is why I switched to just replacing monospace. Do I need to edit a file other than that one to get it to work?? I couldn't find another relevant file, but I might have missed something. I've played with editing the wikiedit toolbar before (I now have Image Manager in mine to make placing images easier (from the students personal directories)) and will add in code (either for the replaced monospace or some other code (if I can get it working)) for commenting at some point. -- Mike
Heh, poke fun all you like. ;-) I know us coder types can take thinks rather literally sometimes (and some of us make an art of that! "can you pass the salt?" "yes.").
About not getting ^^ working - without looking up the Formatter code, I think you'd need to add both the code to handle the "tags" and the appropriate regular expressions, I think. Did you do that? Everywhere? If not, does that hint help at all? --JavaWoman
Oh, regex stuff. Ugh. I don't understand those worth a darn. (although some comments here last week helped me understand them a little) Okay, thanks for the hint. I'll have to tackle it a bit later (got marking to do). -- Mike


Online editing of mindmaps would be great
(copied from Sourceforge.net --NilsLindenberg)
It would be great, if users should work together on mindmaps.

Maybe by downloading/ Open With FreeMind and then having a possiblity to save changes in FreeMind directly back to the online mindmap.


how to format code to get two % characters without space together?
I want to produce a code sample page in wikka with DOS batch code. The code syntax requires two percent characters together to markup a variable. Example: % %variable% % (without the spaces). Wikka always tries to format the text as code, even if I format the DOS code inside a code block, even if I
 marked it as code with two percent characters like this here


Is there a solution? I could not find a literal entity for "percent"

You could use % which is the numerical entity reference for the percent sign: % - but *within* a code block an entity is "escaped" - a problem by itself, and so it wouldn't help. See:
some text with &#37&#37 embedded in it

But it should be possible to just plug in a piece of code without having to worry about which characters and strings to somehow escape - maybe the double percent isn't such a happy choice for Wiki markup of "code"; should we find a character combination that is less likely to be a syntactical meaning in an artificial language? (And how do you markup Wiki markup as code?) -- JavaWoman


How about the € (euro) Symbol? Or is it to new? --NilsLindenberg

The main problem with the € (euro) symbol is not that it's new, but that it's hard to type: most keyboards don't have the symbol. And it might occur in code as well (imagine a sample conversion routine). Wiki markup should be easy to type. So we need a symbol (or sumbol combination, maybe), that's:
  1. easy to type
  1. not likely to occur in any programming code (note "likely" - you can never completely exclude it; think of APL!)
The exclamation mark still seems to be "free", and although a single exclamation mark often is used for negation in programming languages (and in comments, of course) a double one isn't (just don't use rows off exclamation marks in your code comments); or else a combination of an exclamation mark with something else (that is not itself an "operator" in languages). Maybe we should do a search (Google?) to check whether !! or a combo is actually an operator in any language.
-- JavaWoman



markup of diff pages
The 'diff' facility is if course nice - and essential to a Wiki. But I note the differences are marked up only with classes which match to coloring in the stylesheet. If we're doing XHTML, we could do that a little better (as well as more accessible!): the del and ins elements are created to markup deletions and insertions: fully semantic markup!

My proposal:

See 9.4 Marking document changes: The INS and DEL elements for all the details (HTML 4.01 since that's where all the semantics are).
--JavaWoman (standards junkie)

This is related - I found that the diff engine and page history sometimes forgot to close tags. With a list of lists, the indents would get carried forward. Check out my hack. Not CSS compliant by any means, but then again, your suggestion isn't either (list tags are not closed etc etc). I reckon you would probably have to parse each addition/deletion through the SafeHTML checker. -- Sam

Assuming you mean XHTML compliant (sorry) my suggestion certainly is (believe me, I would never suggest anything that isn't XHTML compliant) - I just forgot to mention that closing tags properly is a prerequisite... although I did point to the actual standard which indicates how ins and del must maintain proper tag nesting.
You're right though, I did notice that lists don't seem to be closed properly. I think that should be fixed first (it's a bug, not sure it's recorded as such yet) - then you can do more semantic markup.
-- JavaWoman (standards junkie)

You mean something like that?:

// deletions
else if ($thing == ""¥¥") 
{
$timestamp = $wakka->GetPageTime(); //hopefully this function returns the right format?
return (++$trigger_deleted % 2 ? "<DEL datetime=\"$timestamp\">" : "</DEL>");
}


(naturely the rest has to be changed too)
--NilsLindenberg


showing comments
Working on a test installation, I found the user setting "Show comments by default" did not work. Testing it here, I found it doesn't work here, either.
Haven't dug in the code yet to find where this should happen (but will).

I'm quite happy with Wikka's capabilities out of the box - good starting point! :) I'll likely stay with it - but I'll probably make some extensions... (such as an option to require confirmation of a registration before allowing edit access - validates email).

Great work! JavaWoman

It does work.... just not as might be expected. Comment preference is stored for each page as you browse the wiki. So, if you browse a few pages with comments not showing, it remembers this. Then if you update your preferences and return to the same pages, it still remembers that your previous preference was not to see comments on those pages.

Try this:

- JsnX

Right. I see it does work. ;) Somewhat, um, counterintuitive, though. So I guess my suggestion then becomes that when a user configuration is changed, this change should immediately be stored in the user session/cookie so it's active right from that moment (without closing the browser). That would, I think, be more in line with expected behavior. Possible? (I haven't looked at that area of the code yet.) --JavaWoman.


Language support

I was searching almost whole site to check what kind of languages are supported by this wiki. I was unsuccessful. Is it possible to put somewhere (main page, release note, futures section…) some information about languages they are supported?

Thanks MDD


Problem: Scrolling in the search - field

Not worth to mention but now I am here I write it. Text in the search field is a little bit scrollable. Again ... ;-)

-- SkyWalk


Question: note?

It is me again! What is the function of the "Please add a note on your edit" - field? Again and again: Keep on the good work.

-- SkyWalk




Problem: Five Line Breaks

Just a small problem i found. If you insert five line breaks at the end of a site, the footer jumps into the box.
After all a nice wikki. Keep on the good work.

-- SkyWalk


DB Export

ExportDB : as i'm discovering Wikki (and WikkaWiki) and playing with it on my main server and on my laptop (which too runs an Apache installation), I
was needing a quickly way of making export of my database. So I wrote a quick (and dirty ...) export page to get all the replace SQL commands to populate an instance.

I too may use this in the future to quickly backup an online Wikki site. See this additionnal page for the code : CodeExportdb

-- SergiO


Code block formatting
I was converting a document to Wikka markup format, and I was trying to display MySQL (Console) Table output using the "Code" formatters %%. Everything that appears in a code block is formatted using a monospace font (as I expect), however, since the Edit page handler converts every instance of 4 spaces to a tab, the spacing is thrown off. Below is an example (Select some of the whitespace with your mouse to see the tabs):
----------------------------------------------------------------
OBJECT_TYPE		  COUNT(*)
------------------ ----------
FUNCTION				   12
INDEX					  55
LOB						 4
PACKAGE					 2
PACKAGE BODY				2
SEQUENCE					9
TABLE					  37
TRIGGER					 6
VIEW						1
9 rows selected
no rows selected
--------------------------------------------------------------------


The edit page handler seems to convert spaces to tabs throughout the entire document, including Code blocks.

From edit.php
11:     // replace 4 consecutive spaces with tab character
12:     $body = str_replace("   ", "\t", $body);

Is there any way to make the edit handler leave the spaces alone inside of code blocks?
Thanks! -RichardTerry

Noted. Try commenting out that line for a temporary workaround. -- JsnX
// $body = str_replace("    ", "\t", $body);



Various suggestions
- See MarkHissinkMuller for things I would like to see in Wakka/Wacko/Wikka. Feel free to add/discuss.


Other method to attach files
- I'd like a way to attach files to a page without having to include the {{files}} action. I like using the action to link to attachments, but I'd rather click a link at the bottom of each page to reach the attach form or to see which files are attached to the page. (I'm a PHP newbie, so It would probably take me some time to make a handler to do what I want.) Actually, now I'm kind of used to having all of my attached images displaying at the bottom of the screen, so this isn't a big deal. If I really don't want the attachment list (usually a bunch of images) to display I just remove the {{files}} from the page. -RichardTerry


Installation problem - UTF-8?
- Not a suggestion, but problems: with installing 1.1.3 on a Win 32 Apache 2, with Php 4.3.8 and Mysql 4.1.3. Upgrading from wakka 0.1.2 didn't work (ended with: "creating comment table - failed - hmm"). So I thought I'd do a fresh install. Everything went fine, but there seems to be some problem with utf8. Even when I set the charset in header.php to utf-8, the page is all scrambled. However, in phpMyAdmin, the text in the pages table shows up fine. Any clues? (I need utf-8, by the way ...) BirgitKellner.

Sorry if this was the wrong place for posting this, and feel free to move it to a more appropriate one.

wikka don't support utf-8 yet. this issue is discussed here: WikkaInternationalization (and should be moved from there to its own page, 'cause it's not a trivial problem ;) --moved to HandlingUTF8 ). anyway, i'm afraid you won't find comprehensive help in that discussion. it's not enough to change the meta-tag. that only tells the browser to assume a charset, which in fact isn't used.

i haven't spent much time on that issue, although i am (or should be) interested in it. but be assured that it's not a simple config-value to be squeezed to solve the problem. i hope the discussion mentioned above will get more precise in the next days, as i would appreciate any hint how to start to despair of it ;) i think in long terms it's a must to support different charsets. -- DreckFehler






Regards Simon H.




Using FPDF with Wikka
Not so much a suggestion, more a request although it may be useful to others.
I have been using FPDF from FPDF to export content from a database to pdf files.
I would like to extend my usage of FPDF to wikka by adding a hyperlink to the top of my wikka pages which would allow me to post the page tag or page id to the FPDF script for exporting the content into a pdf file.

The link would be in the form similar to

http://www.mysite.com/script.php?id=

Can anyone tell me how I can extract the page tag or page id from the wikka_pages table in order to do this.

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