[Freedombox-discuss] Wiki Engine for a DreamPlug?

[Philip Hands]

On Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:20:04 -0800, kent <kent at songbird.com> wrote:
...
> > Specifically, I would recommend Ikiwiki!
> 
> I would like to agree, because I like ikiwiki a lot, and it's what I 
> use for my personal projects almost exclusively.  But I think ikiwiki is 
> a piece of software that demands a certain amount of technical 
> sophistication, and if the intent is to have something that the average 
> citizen can easily use, it would be necessary to to set up a wrapper for 
> some canned configurations, with a larger set of themes.

There is the ikiwiki-hosting package, which allows the creation of
new ikiwiki sites quite nicely, although I'm only using it from the
command-line, whereas one would probably want to have a web frontend as
has been done for branchable.com -- I wonder if Joey/Lars would be
willing to bundle that up into a package (assuming that's not already
part of ikiwiki-hosting, that I've not noticed).

The problem is mostly that the people that use ikiwiki are generally not
so bothered about pretty design, so a lot of ikiwiki sites remain in the
default monchrome.

Certainly, one of the reasons I really like ikiwiki is that if it ever
became important to me to have a pretty site, it being unencumbered with
design decisions of its own means that one can do anything one likes
with CSS -- the only problem being that I don't really have an opinion
about what might be better.

> Yes, but surely we don't expect the average user to be tweaking CSS 
> etc?

If someone that's upset about how bland default ikiwiki is would like to
knock up some pretty themes, that would probably do us all a favour.
Particularly if they had some sort of subtle common style about them
that hinted that they were something to do with the freedombox.

Given the sorts of users that are likely to be early adopters, if our
default installation encouraged people to allow cloning of their site's
CSS, that might give rise to one or two of our more creative users
knocking up some nice styles, which is all that would be required to
make ikiwiki pretty enough to keep the average user happy.

I think it would be great if we could make it so that someone's FB
hosted ikiwiki based blog could inspire someone to buy/build their own
instance of FB, at which point they could easily go back to that blog,
and grab a copy of the site's CSS for use on their own blog (licenses
allowing).

As mentioned, the pre-compiled nature of ikiwiki seems like a perfect fit
for FB, since it allows the rendered site to be copied to better
connected hosts if one wants to protect bandwidth to the FB itself, and
it's not (necessarily) going to instantly collapse when slashdotted.

Technical users get the added bonus that it's all stored in git (or
whatever) so off-line editing is possible.

The main problem with ikiwiki is also due to the fact that it's static
content, so while it has modules for doing things like polls and
calendars, it's not exactly a "Click this button to have a poll appear on
the right of the main page" -- you have to put a directive in, and it's
really a bit of a cheat, since it's editing a page for you rather than
storing data in a database.  I have a feeling that non-programmers will
not quite understand what's going on with that.

Likewise, I have used ikiwiki as a CMS for building non-wiki web pages,
by allowing wiki style access via authenticated HTTPS, and rendering the
same content without any of the edit options available, and with some
nicer CSS, as the public website.  It works nicely, and for my brother's
site allows him to maintain a bi-lingual site relatively painlessly, but
I know that there is absolutely no chance that he'd have managed the
configuration required to do that with ikiwiki on his own.  Then again,
he'd not have even thought of making the site multi-lingual.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://www.uk.debian.org/
|(|  10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London  E18 1NE  ENGLAND
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