Wiki module maintainership
Hey there all,
I have been doing a bit of research about setting up wiki sites. The two big "central" modules for wikis are wikitools (by rotzi) and liquid wiki (by sorenp.) Neither module is being actively maintained (no commits since March.) I've spoken to Soren and he said he doesn't have time to maintain Liquid Wiki anymore and it would be better if someone in the community took it over. I never heard back from Julian but through the grapevine I heard that theoretically he had a project which would bring him back to work on wikitools, at least for a while, but probably not permanently (if at all) is my guess.
I think that wiki functionality is something that a lot of people in the community are interested in and it behooves us to have a regularly maintained module/suite of modules that "gets it done." I'd like to proposed that we 1) decide on one wiki module to support and move forward with, 2) deprecate the other, 3) get at least two people who are willing to be co-maintainers and keep the module alive and healthy. The upgrade to 6 will be coming soon and having patches sit in the queue for 3 months waiting for an inactive maintainer to review and commit will be nasty. There are also a number of other related modules and we should check the health of those as well and work as a community to make sure they don't go by the wayside.
So basically this post is just to start of a discussion about the health of wiki modules and future maintenance to see what others think, determine the best course of action for the community and see who is interested in stepping forward.
I'm also posting a link to this to both modules' issue queues.
smaller pieces instead of monolithic modules
I tried to look into liquid wiki, but there was no feature list I could find. So maybe I am a bit off, but I'd rather see a good wiki "package" (possibly install profile, but at least modules tacked together) then a monolithic wiki module. I presented a 5 minute wiki demo at Drupal Conference Hungary back in October with the setup used here on groups.drupal.org (a bit tweaked and shortened of course). This includes:
Setup:
Icing:
Admittedly this is a very simple wiki, but it works for groups.drupal.org. Of course some people would need permissions, discussion pages and so on. But these are possible to get from other modules or are good targets for smaller enhancement modules.
There already is a wiki installation profile
There already is a wiki installation profile. What features do you want to see added to it?
not too friendly
I read through the install profile readme (http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/contributions/profiles/drupal_wik...) and noticed that it requires patching of one of the modules, which is not exactly nice. Otherwise it does not look bad (although I imagine the cvs command would not work for most people with FTP access to their hosts, so a filter without the PEAR requirement would work better with the masses - or an alternate download method for the PEAR stuff at least).
Also there is this floating idea around the community for some time now that install profiles only solve your problem if you want to build specific sites. If you'd like to add a wiki to a successful community forum for example, you still need to go through your hoops. So that's where monolithic modules would be good, although we hate them because of them being so unmaintainable and ugly. That's where packages would come into the picture, but such concepts (to be built from independent modules) are not workable yet. So for now, better documentation of how one builds these pieces together (which requires a list of requirements up front) seems to be a good idea.
Interesting timing
As I mentioned in this issue, I am interested in actively maintaining/co-maintaining the wikitools module. I think that wiki functionality is something that many people want for their Drupal-based sites, and adding more wiki-like features would greatly expand the power of Drupal.
As for getting two people to work on it/actively maintain it, I'd be perfectly happy to co-maintain it with anyone else who is willing to help; however, at the moment, the issue queue is not too long to deal with, nor are the features of the module too extensive: I think it would be possible for me to maintain it by myself.
So, I'm asking you, the Drupal community... what features do you want to see added to the wikitools module? There are some basic bug fixes that need to be dealt with, but beyond that, does anyone have any expansion ideas? Where should this module (wikitools) be going?
Thanks,
cwgordon7
This is interesting timing
I've been wondering what direction to go wrt wiki functionality and DrupalEd -- I've actually been contemplating dropping it in favor of a focused mediawiki integration.
The two biggest needs I see:
Thanks for stepping up and asking about this -- really, the wiki functionality is close, and if I had to prioritize the two items above I'd say simultaneous editing is more needed than the discussion page (as that could also be handled via nodereferences/etc).
BTW, I'm getting wiki functionality from wikitools, diff, and freelinking.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
Any progress on simultaneous editing?
Hi Bill or others,
Any movement on a solution for simultaneous editing -- or at least an error message on edit (as opposed to on submit) if someone is trying to edit a node that is currently being edited?
Thanks,
Shai
hi
hi everyone
I am actually planning on resuming my work in the next time (i.e. the next month). My studies keep me quite busy but I planned to update the modules to the new drupal version and start bugfixing. I would be happy to have someone co-maintaining my modules (wikitools / pearwiki_filter), so I guess I have to talk to cwgordon7 for that.
Sorry that I was so quiet lately, but I hope we can continue the effort to integrate wiki functionality in drupal.
Julian
I'd be happy to co-maintain
I'd be happy to co-maintain the wikitools module with you. I don't know much about the pearwiki_filter module, haven't really used it, but I'll look into it.
-cwgordon7
good to hear from you!
Hello, Julian,
Glad to hear you chime in on this thread -- your work brought us to this point, and I'm glad to hear you will be getting back into the code --
And no need to apologize for being quiet on this -- we all have things to do, and as Moshe points out, the work you have done gets us pretty far along -- with you moving this forward, and working with co-maintainers, I'm looking forward to seeing what develops.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
I found a drupal "talk"
I found a drupal "talk" (moving comments to a separate tab) module available for download on a third-party site (not drupal.org), and hacked it a bit to make links to comments work better. e.g. http://crocodyl.com/ http://hackmeet.org/node/6/talk Is anyone maintaining this module or something like it on drupal.org? (if not I'd contribute it)
Wow!
Wow! This sounds great! I've never seen anything like this contributed on drupal.org: is it under the correct license to be posted there? If it is, I look forward to using it! Thank you so much!
-cwgordon7
I believe it's this module,
I believe it's this module, with a couple tweaks: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/contributions/sandbox/toemaz/talk...
talk module
Feel free to check it out and make an official release of it.
One outstanding issue with this module: http://groups.drupal.org/node/2931#comment-8839 Thx to the rewrite patch this issue should be resolved but this module still needs to be adjusted for it.
Organization
The problem that I think people are having (correct me if I'm wrong) is that all of the modules used to create a wiki-like system are scattered across Drupal in an uncoordinated, difficult-to-find manner. There should be a massive reorganization of these modules. Here is a hierarchical structure of how the wiki system should be (as I view it):
Entire Drupal Wiki Functionality
How should we divide all this up into modules, packages of modules, installation profiles, etc.?
toughen up
it isn't ideal, but this is not rocket science either. one great documentation page or video can pretty much solve the problem of not knowing which modules to use and how to configure them. wikitools already has a fine demo site, and some nice docs. we are not starting from scratch.
wikitools is the way forward, friends. glad to have julian working on it again.
where is the wikitools doc and site?
I've been trying to access the wikitools site for ages - the demo site has generated sql errors for months now, the demo site is down for maintenance since before summer and the screenshots are generating sql errors too ...
I'm using drupaled and what looks like a standard implementation of wikitools - What I'd like to be able to do is create a wiki that is hierarchical - at the moment, the only way that we ahve found to acess wiki pages is via the group's recent activity links ... there doesn't seem any way to be able to create a menu structure for the wiki that would make it useable ...
Any ideas or pointers as to how to solve this would be good.
I had also looked at bitweaver, but opted for drupal because of the ability to have user created groups etc - however, the wiki functionality (as I have found so far) is far less effective in drupal
thanks
What if you specified
What if, instead of creating a "Wiki page" type content, you used the drupal core "Book page" as wiki-type content? Then, you could use the book's hierarchical categorization system to categorize the content?
books and wikis
I remember looking at books a while ago - would it be possible to integrate wiki style page creation etc into this? Sorry if these are obvious questions, but , as someone pointed out a few posts up, all the different modules are very scattered around
thanks
*IS* Julian working on it?
There still seems to be no activity in the issue queues for any of Julian's modules and his demo site is not really working anymore. If his wiki modules are the road we want to go down then we need to get the upgrades to 6 and issue queues addressed sooner rather than later. cwgordon7 has offered to step up and I think we should go ahead and at least get a co-maintainer that is active and will start moving forward. If Julian wants to be involved, that's awesome, but I don't think the community wants to sit around waiting for him anymore.
Liquid
at least for Liquid, the modules I've used are:
This actually creates a fully functional wiki. I happen to like Liquid wiki over Wikitools because of the option to move content into and out of the "wiki".
I have wikis hosted on more traditional wiki engines (like http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/HiveChanges) so I have some experience with totally open wiki sites.
I hope if we concentrate on WikiTools, that we can incorporate the vital function of moving pages to and from wiki. Beyond that, I actually couldn't see much difference between WikiTools and Liquid, other than that Liquid separates "Wiki" content up front. I also liked that, actually.
Maybe Wiktools could become a "glue" module, that would allow optional sub-modules for wiki, like the Liquid options?
Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Blog
Any content type as wiki pages
It's nice to see this discussion and the work being done to progress the wiki and related modules. Sam, I would suggest that it's best to be able to have any of your content types be a wiki page which is something that can set Drupal apart and even make it more useful in that regard. Having an open site with many people editing structured data types can be really useful.
--
Gravitek Labs
Chris, I agree with you,
Chris, I agree with you, although in practice there are times when people that I am working with would prefer that some content not be co-editable.
Since I wrote the comment above, I have switched over to WikiTools, and have come up with new ways to manage wiki content, that don't require the ability to move content into and out of "wiki".
I have yet to work with a community of people who are ready to embrace all Drupal content as wiki content.
Yet, I also am looking at using Drupal as the basis for a new "wiki", or in place of a wiki engine. This wiki would be a place-based wiki, similar to http://arborwiki.org, but using many different content types. Also, it would incorporate a democratic process for the implementation of new content types, new features, etc.
So, ChrisB, I think I am going to be trying out your idea in the near future, and I'll report back here about how this works out in practice. There are some issues to work out with anti-spam, and other admin issues, too.
Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Open Source Ecology
P2P Foundation