Wiki New Extension Preview

Wiki New Extension Preview

[Taco Hoekwater]

Hi,

Some of you already know that I have been working on a wiki extension to control the editing of /Command pages.

The goal is to eventually be able to easily export all of the reference documentation in the wiki to a separate system (for instance, Paul Mazaitis plans to create a full-blown reference manual). In the current situation, this is nearly impossible because there is so much variation in the content and quality of the wiki /Command pages (not to mention that many are missing). We also want it to be possible to merge improvements to the interface xml definitions by Wolfgang without loosing any existing documentation work.

After some evenings and weekends of steady discussion with Paul, Wolfgang and some others on the wiki mailing list and a fair bit of hacking, this plan is now starting to come together. In short, we will switch to XML as the page model for newly created /Command pages. This makes editing a bit harder, but it allows much better quality control and (fairly) easy export and import.

The new extension is not installed on the normal wiki yet, because it makes sense to see if we can get some of the bugs ironed out before we start working on actual /Command pages. It is my first ever Wiki extension and even my first non-trivial php code, thus I am certain there will be bugs. So, while the documentation pages are already on the normal wiki, any testing and/or experimenting has to be done on the test wiki.

The documentation pages are here:

  https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Command
  https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Help:Command
  https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Extension:ConTeXtXML

and there is a small todo list here:

  https://wiki.contextgarden.net/User_talk:Taco

For playing around / experimenting / testing, have fun at

  https://wikitest.contextgarden.net/

(but read at least Help:Command first!)

A useful landing page on the test wiki to start playing around is:

  https://wikitest.contextgarden.net/Allcommands

which is a list of all the commands that are included in Wolfgang’s interface xml (and thus available to be documented using the new wiki extension). 

All the bright red links are currently undocumented commands. Clicking on one should bring you to the edit screen automatically, with a blob of XML preloaded, ready for you to start writing.

All the dark red links are existing /Command pages. Almost all of those are traditional wiki text pagse. Following those links will bring you to a normal /Command page just like on the main wiki. If you want to see how one of those pages would look like in the new system, you’ll have to rename the existing page first. 

Be assured that nothing on the wikitest is permanent! As long as the browser url says “ https://wikitest.contextgarden.net/ ” you cannot destroy anything important. But don’t spend hours improving existing pages yet, this preview is intended for catching bugs in the extension only.

Comments, Suggestions and Bug reports are more than welcome. 

Please direct those to me personally or (better) to the wiki mailing list:

	https://lists.contextgarden.net/mailman/listinfo/wiki

Have fun!

Taco


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