TypedPages:Wikka

Revision [15398]

This is an old revision of TypedPages made by MasinAlDujaili on 2006-10-05 10:42:26.

Typed Pages

The basic idea is to have a selection box during page creation where the user decides how the page content should be interpreted. The page types are simply templates how data has to be entered respectively displayed. This way you could make use of WikkaWiki as a generic database interface (with limitations, of course) where you could store different but recurring data types. It might be useful for:

item lists and character lists for RPGs

personal presentation

biographies and discographies

galleries

calendars

task schedulers

forums (and bulletin boards and guestbooks)

bug tracker

blogs (and diaries)

web mailer

Even if a lot of the above might be accomplished using actions or just mere Wiki syntax, it might not be the most elegant way of doing this. Basically, the data of the page content is used to fill fields in the page type template. The template might be in Wiki syntax, making it easy to maintain as a wiki page, or a raw HTML file. In both cases there's need for facilities to enter only once the template commands for recurring data.

Data fields

In the template data fields could be adressed using the ::(identifier) markup (alt. ::(%identifier%)). In the wiki page content the data is stored as

::(first name)Masin::
::(last name)Al-Dujaili::
::(gender)m::
::(birth date)1977-02-17::

Generic fields

I haven't looked at the wikka tables closely but I guess there are some database fields already defined ;-). At least content I remember having seen. In the context of data fields for page typing, every data field content is stored in the database field content besides any other data fields. Every template should have the generic data field content. Additionally we might define fields like user and timestamp but these are probably already in the database. Perhaps someone with more experience in data organisation should have a look at this.

Forum data fields

A forum might be realized using a template with these data fields:

::(%inreplyto%)::
::(%title%)::
::(%author%)::
::(%timestamp%)::
::(%content%)::
::(%followup%)::

These data fields could even be defined more precisely:

::(%inreplyto%)%parent_read_only%::
::(%title%)re: %parent%::
::(%author%)%current_user%::
::(%timestamp%)%automatic%::
::(%content%)%parent%::
::(%followup%)%children%::

Of course the key words or macros would have to be defined somewhere. And it could be done more elegant or more simple. Maybe someone wants to share her ideas concerning this.

Type Templates

Template Names

There should be a naming convention for type templates. Currently all pages ending in 'Template' are recognized as templates which some actions use for a different behaviour. I'd suppose to use 'TTemplate' for backwards compatibility, the first 'T' meaning simply 'Type'.

Working with Typed Pages

Creating

When creating a page, the first step would be to decide which type the page is. A simple dropdown list of all pages ending with 'TTemplate' might be sufficient but not too descriptive. Part of any TTemplate should be something like ::(pagetype)This is the display name of the page type::. One backdraw might be, that any page creation process is accompanied by a lot of database queries -- might not be too performant. On the other hand: The extension LinkUsingPageTitle does something quite similar. Considering this, one question arises: Why not use a header for the TTemplate display name? Because it might be used for display of the typed page content.

After choosing the desired type, the page either dynamically reloads with the current selection or just displays a link 'Continue'.

Editing

Editing should work just as used to. Wikka displays a page with all fields valid for the current page type.

Altering

Don't know if it's of any use, but it could even be possible to alter the page type after creation. In case of an alteration from a page type other than 'Wiki page' to 'Wiki page' it just displays it's page content with all the colon markup (see above). Page alteration should be highly tolerant, thus altering a calendar page to a forum page (why ever!) should preserve as much as possible, e.g. all unknown markup should be dropped to the content field, a field generic to all templates and always visible (at least during page type alteration). Thus a user might cut&paste the data to its destination fields.

Storing Typed Pages

All typed pages should be stored with their page type at the beginning. We could alter the Wikka database to have a field pagetype, though.

to be continued

Wikka : TypedPages

Revision [15398]