php & wikis

[andu]

--On Friday, June 06, 2003 15:02:52 -0700 Alain Farmer 
<alain_farmer at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hello David, Andu, and y'all,
<snip>
> That's odd! My experience is exactly the contrary.
> Blogs are like un-threaded forums. The messages just
> pile in one after the other, most recent one on the
> top.

That's the thing, blogs are not meant to be forums (and I noticed the link 
you provided is just that) they are closer to a public journal so to speak 
(http://mental.archeopterix.com). I've seen proper weblogs with several 
members but the entries were more like short essays, not a conversation. 
For conversations you have mailing lists or forums.

> Wikis, OTOH, are more like a
> editable website. The content is divided into
> hyperlinked pages. The info becomes hierarchically
> organized (a good thing) without sacrificing any of
> the hyper-linking to any other page or site. The
> knowledge being built with the wiki has a stable feel
> to it, and bits of it can be subsequently tweaked as
> many times as you like; whereas, in blogs, only the
> admin has the power to modify the content of the
> contributions.

Weblogs are not supposed to be edited in the way wikis are because... they 
are not wikis.

>
> What I don't like about wikis, or rather the ones I
> have used so far, is that the web interface is the
> *only* way to interact with the wiki; whereas the blog
> can also be mailed to or accessed by any XML-RPC
> client. But I have since discovered that there are
> wikis that also do XML-RPC. Without this 'automation'
> potential, making global changes in a wiki is a
> nightmare. You literally have to go to each-and-every
> page as any 'user' would. Which is why I am still
> interested in systems like Zope. A global change of a
> footer on [a subset of] all pages is a cinch with Zope
> : all you have to do is change one file in the
> appropriate place in the object hierarchy.

I don't get it, you want to read the wiki in a browser but to edit it in a 
different application, why use wiki. The thing with the footer is just a 
matter of design, you can have the script insert a footer in all pages as 
they are served. I'm not a friend of html but I recently discovered the 
potential of css (kind of late, I know) and I do believe that good design 
can make a difference. Zope is great but it comes with a learning curve.





Regards, Andu Novac