Re: This Wiki Implementation

[Petite Abeille <petite_abeille@...>]

On Feb 19, 2008, at 12:38 AM, John Belmonte wrote:

> Nevertheless, give the right circumstances I'm not ruling out a Lua
> implementation.  In fact, a few months ago I tried to reach Daniel
> Silverstone about migrating to his Aranha Wiki engine.

Is there any information about Aranha's wiki engine anywhere?

http://www.digital-scurf.org/software/aranha

Perhaps it would be worthwhile adding Aranha's wiki to the comparison  
page:

http://alt.textdrive.com/assets/public/Nanoki/WikiComparison.html

>  Anyway, the reasons I would
> consider that wiki are:  1) it painstakingly emulates the current Lua
> wiki markup;

Is such wiki markup documented anywhere? Is there any existing Lua  
library to handle it?

>  2) it preserves idioms of the current wiki (e.g.
> clicking on title yields referring pages);

Then Nanoki is not for you if this is such a show stopper :))

Clicking on the page title leads to the editor, the most likely action  
you want to perform on a wiki page. The related pages are at the  
bottom of the content, where they naturally belong :))

Of course, there is no accounting for taste, so this could  
theoretically be changed to suit the prevalent fashion in wiki design.


>  3) its interface and
> usability are very simple (e.g. simple preferences page, registration
> not required for editing);

Hmmm... why a preference page?

>  and 4) it is strict about web standards.

Any wiki engine can be strict about web standards... but... a wiki is  
mostly defined by the free form content that people put there... there  
is not much a wiki engine can do to prevent invalid HTML in a free  
form text without undesirable obstructionism...

> I'm not interested in trading a big mess of Perl for a big mess of  
> Lua.

Arguably, the later would fit better with what lua-users.org aims to  
represent.

> Functionality to automatically deal with spam is absolutely critical
> for a popular, no-registration wiki such as as lua-users.

Yes, at this point this is really the only technical hurdle for any  
new wiki engine, as by definition they do not have the accumulated  
years of experience preventing spam.

But they could learn from lua-users.org wiki's experience. What  
specific anti-spam technics does lua-users.org use presently?

Also... is the full source code of the current lua-users.org wiki  
implementation available anywhere?

Cheers,

PA.