PW wiki-tree type project

[Joss]

I am not going to do this yet (I don't have time and am not sure how) but this could be a fun project:

Basically, it is to create a hierarchical wiki site with Processwire.

The way this would work would be all from the front end and is all about parents and children and their brothers and sisters.

The site starts with only a home page, a login page and a registration page.

Once you are registered and logged in, your only interest is the home page. It comes with one BIG button

Create Child

Child pages get two buttons:

Create Sibling - Create Child

And that is it. You decide which one is appropriate and create it,. The resulting form is very simple:

• Page Name
  
• Long Page Name (title|headline stuff)
  
• Body text
  
• Some fields that allow cross family relationships (cousins?)
  
• Tags to help searching - call them "familial traits" just for fun.
  
• Additional things that can be added like charts, sidebar stuff, citations - these are luxury items that can be added later.
  

So that it is. You then go and create a wiki site that is all about relationships.

Everything is done on the front end (ish - this can be cheated using modal windows) and it can be a free for all or not. (for instance you can give users publish, edit, edit own, create rights as required).

Someone can have a lot of fun designing a JQuery based browsing system that actually maps out the relationships in a family tree and can be rearranged by family traits (show me all pages that have ginger hair??)

Cant think of anything else to add, to be honest.

Joss

PS - the first use would be a meandering hints and tips site for Processwire itself, of course!

PPS - Why not use Mediawiki? Because it is boring and is arranged in long lists from categories. This is a family tree of information. It is both more fun and more confusing.

[Pete]

There have actually been talks of a non-Mediawiki documentation section for the PW site, more because Mediawiki is a pain to administrate and upgrade and is easily spammed.

I think the biggest hurdle to overcome is that I can't see it working without version control for the pages if you are allowing anyone to edit pages. It would be nice to be able to roll back spam edits or even have the ability for certain people to approve changes to some sections I think.

[Joss]

I quite agree - especially the last bit. I regularly set up Managing Editor - Section Desk - Author relationships on sites, in true newspaper style.

Where Authors can write for any section, section desk editors can only edit their own section and managing editors commit to publish. Works especially well on magazine style sites where you have set publishing days to help make an impact.

The other thing that could be added is public and private commenting.

Public would be simply that - standard nested commenting system that the public can read.

Private would be more like the Talk section of Wikipedia, but only available to the writers.

You could have 5 publishing states:

Published - Viewable to the public

Commissioned - not yet published, but open to view from other registered users and private commenting

Sent to Desk (or pending) - Awaiting editing and commissioning (only viewable by author and editor)

Un-submitted - Still with the author

Archived - withdrawn and kept for reference only. This should have notes with it explaining why it was withdrawn and an optional lock if it should not be re-published for any reason.

And then versioning - though I find the Wikipedia's version of this confusing as hell! Google Site's versioning can be a bit better, as can MS Word. Maybe do something with showing edits and comments.

A lot of that, of course, is luxurious stuff that can be grown onto the initial structure

Joss

(Note, I have a real bug-bear about the use of a "publisher" role in some CMS like Joomla where the publisher presses the publish button - Publishers are not editors and do not finalize copy. Publishers generally are the owners.)

[Pete]

I think that whilst on the surface this sounds a bit like a coding headache I can see various different workflows working for different scenarios.

The way I think that this would work best is with either a matrix permssions module (a bit old-school) or a visual workflow permissions editor so you can really tailor the permissions and approvals based on your own way of working. What I mean by that last bit is a bit like how Lemonstand e-commerce handles discounts - you set the conditions (in this case I guess which parent in the tree you want this to apply to the children of) and what happens when certain conditions are met.

Here's a quick example of Lemonstand's system - don't bother reading it all but look at the screenshots for a rough idea of how you set these things up: http://lemonstand.com/docs/shopping_cart_price_rules/

Obviously the PW version could be done easily with an ASMSelect menu to select the parent or a certain page template or a custom Selector.

Just thinking out loud.