Cornucopt Dev Log

WILL CODE FOR CANDY

Because I’ve promised my November free time to another project, I’m going to see if I can’t get an 0.1 release of Cornucopt onto SourceForge by the 31st. That means enabling user bans and page locks (and maaaaybe IP bans but likely not), and killing that one login bug. Seems possibly doable over the weekend.

But what I’m really here to write about is something else. I’ve been thinking some more about this wikified-templates thing, and how it could lead to what you might call “third generation” wikihood.

I have, floating around in this humid little brain of mine, some thoughts as to how pagetypes are going to have to change in the near future. It turns out that, as lovely as the object-oriented model is for me to write, it’s a bit confining. A new pagetype can, as far as I know, only inherit the behaviors of one parent class in PHP 4. (Heh - you might call it a strict-father model.) So, for instance, if I wanted to add functionality to the basic Page class that added Flickr-esque tags, but I also wanted to have tags on SoftlinkPages, I would have to duplicate the tag code, unless I’m mistaken.

I’ve decided to regress, if that’s the word, to the “plug-in” model favored by packages like WordPress and Movable Type. Instead of subclassing all of the Page code and modifying or extending it, most pagetypes will just be a bunch of functions that get called when a page of the right type does its regular Page thing. This may be easier for many developers to understand.

It also opens another door: that of actually having the PHP code that makes a pagetype work… (deep breath) reside in the wiki.

Obviously, you will not want to give just anyone access to a wiki page that gets executed as PHP code. This action on my part will raise the stakes on hard security a great deal; if there’s some hole in my code that lets people fake admin access, or whatever other kind of access that has the permission to create and modify templates, then people could inject PHP code that wipes the database, destroys files on the host computer, infects the host computer with viruses, and just generally kills kittens. Yikes.

But, he said while wiping his brow, think of the upside. Imagine if extending a wiki’s functionality were as simple as clicking ‘create new page’ and selecting the ‘pagetype’ pagetype. That’s what JotSpot is after, although they are taking the (frankly much more sane) approach of a vaguely programmatic markup language. It may be that I eventually decide that I am smart enough to take that approach, or I may build some kind of extra frippery that makes editing pagetype scripts take longer, or restrains it otherwise. Or I may just give people enough rope to hang themselves; what do I care?

I really want to find a way to do this. This is HyperCard reborn, this is a revolution in waiting. I have no reason to expect that I will get there first or at all, but promise like that is the reason I write code.

I am sounding a little wild-eyed and need to be more clear about how this all follows logically from wikified templates, and about how pagetypes, pagevars and templates would fit together in this model. Watch this space.

October 27th, 2004

You are who we say you are… and that’s good

On the subject of what sorts of parts of the rest of the net might be useful to wikis, Corny, or both: social networking systems.

Not the ones we know and loathe today, mind you. Systems like Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn, MySpace, Tribe.net and on and on all have inflated opinions of their own utility, and most are closed to outside use anyway. They don’t even make good use of the rest of the net themselves; they’re walled gardens.

No, the social networking systems I’m interested in 1) haven’t been built yet, and 2) will have, in true small-pieces-loosely-joined fashion, deliberately low utility by themselves. (In fact, the ones that are trying to have even a little bit more usefulness are only drawing fire for it.)

I’m thinking that external semantic social networks could help wikis form a kind of “firm security” as an alternative to hard security, keeping some of hard security’s strengths over soft, while eliminating some of its weaknesses. See, social networks are useful at validating a self-asserted identity. How do I know you’re you? Because all the people you know say that you are.

That concept alone is far from perfect, but it’s also far from as bad as you might think. Have a look at LOAF, which describes itself as an “extension to email that lets you append your entire address book to outgoing mail message[s] without compromising your privacy,” so that “[c]orrespondents can use this information to prioritize their mail.” Random email sent from someone who knows a friend of yours, as evidenced by that friend’s presence in their address book, might be more trustable than random email from someone unknown. There are holes in LOAF as currently implemented, but the general idea is pretty intriguing. Merge it with cell phones, and the Bluetooth capability thereof, and it might get hot in here indeed.

Building such a system as part of a given wiki engine would be missing the point, in my view; the point is small pieces, loosely joined. Let someone else build a general-purpose system of some sort, then don’t be so much of a not-invented-here Wiki snob that you don’t take advantage. That’s the future.

October 27th, 2004