On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 01:34:41PM -0700, Jon Phillips wrote:
I've been thinking about this approach for sometime in basically converting our entire site to mediawiki and tweaking the stylesheets and making main pages require user/pass. Hula does a great job of this
This is an approach I've done in a couple past projects. I also had the same idea that doing everything in wiki would make the site easily editable and simplify the maintenace.
However, in practice I found that this idea didn't alway pan out as well as I'd imagined. There were several problems. First, invariably I needed to do some sort of layout that wiki couldn't quite handle. Being able to lay out individual pages in PHP or HTML directly is quite advantageous. Second, a strength of wiki is how quickly it can grow, but for a main website this can also be a weakness; I found that the wiki-based sites quickly became quite challenging to navigate. Third, the assumption that a wiki would be easier to edit often does not pan out. People who have the motivation to actually write content for a website typically also either know HTML or have a will/desire to learn it. For true website geeks, who eat and breathe HTML, using a wiki for the website can actually be constraining, and can drive them from being willing to contribute.
Thus, when I set up the web stuff for inkscape, I was quite deliberate in setting up both a PHP-based "shell", as well as a wiki for more freeform editing. You could argue that a given page in the wiki belongs on the site, or vice versa, but note how the main inkscape site is straightforward to navigate through, remains fairly consistent from visit to visit, and tends to just have what you need. Meanwhile the wiki is a seething brew of ideas, comments, etc. and while it may be tough to browse through, there's a LOT of good stuff in it.
Anyway, all that said, Mediawiki is a very good wiki, and it solves a number of issues mentioned above. So possibly with mediawiki it can all be done in one system. However, it would surprise me to see this.
Right now we have way too many links on our menu and the main page is starting to become a mess.
Agreed
Anyhow, Bulia, I think before more tweaks happen on the page, maybe you should pass them by people. Maybe changing all of these things would be the equivalent of me coming in and moving the toolbars around in inkscape without discussing with anyone -- I think a few ppl. would get miffed about this.
Actually, I still think that making the changes directly is best; requiring that changes be discussed ahead of time can lead to a lot of inefficient debates and arguments. However, I would emphasize that one should take care to "Patch first, discuss later", not "Patch first, period." ;-)
Bryce