WILL CODE FOR CANDY
October 27th, 2004
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.