Phosphorus and Lime
A Developer's Broadsheet
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Thursday, July 12, 2007
Wikka: A New Page Handler Model
A while ago, I was looking at wiki packages for the LAMP platform. I had worked with mediawiki, but felt it was a bit too much for what I wanted to do: lightweight wikis for a few small websites and my local development server.
I found wikka, tried it out, installed it, and haven't had any regrets. Still, for all its virtues, one thing I discovered with wikka is, from a web designer's point-of-view, it's not the easiest thing in the world to modify. Granted, you can edit most features through the stylesheet easily enough. But if you want to really re-arrange the layout and need to touch the html markup, well, that's where things get a little hairy.
You can see what I mean here -- that's the latest version of the code in question. Here is my proposed revision. It preserves all the current elements of the code and implements a controller logic to make everything a little more orderly. I've brought it attention to the developers of wikka (Ticket #532). I suspect it may conflict with some of their project conventions. Nevertheless, conceptually, I believe it would provide a much cleaner basis for rendering display pages and I imagine it would be relatively easy from here to integrate into the main framework class as a simple templating system.
I found wikka, tried it out, installed it, and haven't had any regrets. Still, for all its virtues, one thing I discovered with wikka is, from a web designer's point-of-view, it's not the easiest thing in the world to modify. Granted, you can edit most features through the stylesheet easily enough. But if you want to really re-arrange the layout and need to touch the html markup, well, that's where things get a little hairy.
You can see what I mean here -- that's the latest version of the code in question. Here is my proposed revision. It preserves all the current elements of the code and implements a controller logic to make everything a little more orderly. I've brought it attention to the developers of wikka (Ticket #532). I suspect it may conflict with some of their project conventions. Nevertheless, conceptually, I believe it would provide a much cleaner basis for rendering display pages and I imagine it would be relatively easy from here to integrate into the main framework class as a simple templating system.
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