The beginning of a beautiful battle
October 11th, 2003
It’s looking like PhpWiki has matured technically a whole damn lot. It has WikiPlugins, which can probably be made to act like my envisioned pagetypes. They could even be more flexible than pagetypes, but, accordingly, harder to control. It also has SubPages, which is just a simple hierarchy mechanism - combine that with some key plugins and you can basically hack up something that looks a lot like Everything2. (Aping E2 isn’t the goal of the Wicker project, but it’s one useful benchmark - if we can do all that, we can probably do a lot of other, more interesting stuff too.)
So I’m tempted to drop Wicker and start hacking on PhpWiki instead. But the trouble with this comes down to implementation, as it always seems to do in Wikiland. It’s always difficult to understand other people’s code. My objections come down to interface, mostly - the specific way PhpWiki lets people into all this functionality just feels sort of wrong to me. And, as I sort of covered earlier, that seems to be why there are so many Wiki codebases. Some developer says, “that’s not the way I’d do it,” and soon there are n + 1 Wikis, where n = too damn many. I’m self-conscious about contributing to this problem.
So, as my paranoia increases about little problems in my code - security, inflexibility et alia - the temptation to cut bait and hack on something else increases. With that action would die the already-unhealthy dream of making some money off this software. I really just want my mammoth wiki-weblog-E2-like playground…
(Side note: RSS feeds for comments on individual posts really suck compared to MT’s built-in Recent Comments for an entire blog, which can be RSSed just as simply. I’ll correct this, uh, sometime.)
Entry Filed under: Vision