[grubstreet] Post hackfest thoughts

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In particular, my thought train is going along particular lines towards more plugins for CGI::Wiki, which are not critical for
OpenGuides, but would be one or more useful CGI::Wiki plugins. I think it might help with takeup of CGI::Wiki outside the existing
wiki world, and maybe even in the corporate world. In my opinion, the Everything engine sucks, and we could probably do something
much better :).

1. Authentication

My idea for authentication is that we have a scheme similar to /etc/passwd and groups with users and groups - a user may belong to
more than one group as on modern Unix systems.

There is also the equivalent of a umask in the personal settings, and a protection mask on each page. Each page also has a defined
user (author), as does each revision in the history. This is set automatically  when the page is created, and can optionally be set
to your uid when you make a change.

The protection mask can be used to hard lock a page, or to deny access completely. Those with "admin rights" can see and edit any
page, like root can with files.

2. Soft locking.

It would be nice to see that someone else is changing a page before you edit it. The soft locks can have a time stamp and expiry.

3. Personal Inbox.

This is a nice feature of the Everything engine I would like to steal ;). If you want to post a private message to another user on
the CGI::Wiki site, there is a text box and send button on the page template. Also on the page template are the last 5 (say)
messages of  the personal inbox. There would also be a provision for a wikibot to post (and possibly receive) messages.

There is also no reason why the personal inbox cannot be a normal wiki page. You remove messages by ... removing messages :).

There could also be a way of attaching the personal inbox to your email address, so that you receive the messages as emails. Or
pagers, or possibly SMS.

4. Declaring an interest in a page.

We could add metadata saying bloggs is interested in the foobar page. Then, whenever anybody edits the foobar page, bloggs gets a
personal message.

5. Workflows and page tracking

Borrowing an idea from Bricolage, there's no reason why there couldn't be some status metadata with each page: in progress, under
review, approved, published.

6. Editable templates

Taking another idea from Bricolage, the templates could be wiki pages, tagged suitably to indicate that they are used as templates.
Preview of one of these pages could be interesting - maybe fill fields with 99999 or xxxxx - or perhaps another editable window in
which to put parameter values.

Ivor.


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• [grubstreet] Post hackfest thoughts Ivor Williams 12:39 on 21 Apr 2003
  In particular, my thought train is going along particular lines towards more plugins for CGI::Wiki, which are not critical for

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