Chromatic On The Wiki Plugin For Slash 104
lisam writes: "The Wiki plugin integrates nicely with Slash and has a lot of cool features, says Chromatic who introduces Wikis and gives a detailed
explanation of how and why the Wiki plugin works in this OnLamp article. (chromatic is coauthor of O'Reilly's upcoming Running Weblogs with Slash.)" A lot of people just think of Slashdot style sites when thinking of the Slash codebase, but this article goes on about how to extend slash in cool ways. If you are interested in plugins, the repository is a good place to start.
Re:What's this? (Score:1, Informative)
I've been harping on this issue since I first noticed the connection a few months back, but there hasn't been a stemming of Lisa's adverts. It's rather picked up the pace, somewhat.
I guess until people start realizing that the stories proffered by Lisa are nothing more than vaguely disguised commercials for O'Reilly books and conferences, this type of
Re:Chromatic's book (Score:4, Informative)
And no I am not Offtopic; I'm trying to transfer the Offtopic people into their own discussion.
Re:Wiki for work? (Score:2, Informative)
We use a Wiki here at http://www.realeum.com to keep track of a lot of developer information - servers, databases, source code branches, JNLP applications, release dates - you name it. We use a Linux box running Jim Doyle's Tomcat port of Rus Heywood's DevWiki (http://www.gis.net/~jimdoyle/devwiki/devwiki-tom
We don't do much in the way of archiving... we just kind of use it as a bulletin board. It's definitely very useful though.
Yours,
Tom
Re:Chromatic's book (Score:4, Informative)
Chapter 8 of the book is all about the mechanics and philosophy of building a community out of the random visitors who stumble on your website. Most of it isn't limited to running a Slash site, and a lot of it is common sense stuff if you have a background in journalism or publishing.
We tried to come up with a good mixture of ethical and practical ideas, like how to keep readers informed of things, writing author guidelines, and handling mistakes and errata. There's also a discussion on the moderation system (in chapters 6 and 8), including some of the ways in which it can fail. Krow has a nice bit in there about the point at which user moderation is useful (for small sites, it generally isn't).
You're probably more interested in the sections about "Anti-Abuse" features. Comment filters are described, along with their failings, and the example of how to modify Slash code itself involves making the filters less strict to posters with karma above an administrator defined level. It also describes things like IP and Network blacklists.
The approach we take in the book is that these features (moderation, filters, blacklists) are merely tools that administrators can use to keep their site running and their quality of discussion and service high. If you have to use them, make the rules plain and simple and stick by them, but don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off.
For what it's worth, I put forth the idea that having a recurring story [slashdot.org] about the site itself, where the administrators and editors participate in the comments, is one of the best things a site can do.
I'm not privy to a lot of details specific to the operations of Slashdot itself, so my opinion on those is merely wild speculation... though I have read the code and do know what's possible. :)
Re:Congrats, guys (Score:2, Informative)
Funny you mention that... has a copy of chapter 2 somehow gone backwards in time? :)
There's not a whole lot on multi-machine configurations, but it does come up. If you can get it installed in that situation -- and it's not difficult -- it works almost the same as a single-machine site. I'm really impressed.
Flavors of Wiki/Slash? (Score:2, Informative)
I'm wondering, are there alternative implementations of Slash? Of Wiki? Is everything written in Perl (no value judgment here)?
How difficult would it be to port Slash to Java Servlets? Wiki?
The reason I'm asking is not because I'm a Java bigot or anything, but because (1) it seems to be the platform of choice for the Apache Project [apache.org], and (2) I have a couple of webapps deployed, and I would like to know how difficult would be to integrate Slash/Wiki with them.
Any comments from developers/porters welcome. Thank you!
it is what it is (what it is) (Score:2, Informative)
The article is indeed designed to promote the book, but I wanted to write something new and unique instead of retreading what's in the book. It does contain a similar example, but the article had more room for a longer plugin.
You're welcome not to buy the book, and I hope there's enough information in the article that a decent programmer could write a new plugin without it. Feel free to send me a dollar if you do, though. :)
(I will, of course, sympathize with the cynics who say that Malda wants to promote the book 'cuz he wrote the foreword. No, he didn't use crayon. It's a nice piece.)
Re:Flavors of Wiki/Slash? (Score:2, Informative)
Just pick an obscure language and I can bet there is an open source Wiki implementation for it.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines [c2.com]
Don't know about Slash.
Stephan
Re:Wikis and Weblogs, A Match Made in Heaven (Score:2, Informative)
As a user of real Wikis in corporate environments where communication and clarity are essential, I can heartily recommend the use of CapitalWordLinks over any special syntax.
There are lot of reasons why such links are superior, including:
In short, people who don't like WikiStyleLinks usually don't like them because they haven't given them an honest try.
Re:Flavors of Wiki/Slash? (Score:1, Informative)