Re: [ANN] lua-users.org alternative wiki demo

[David Manura <dm.lua@...>]

Thomas Harning writes:
> Also... I'd strongly recommend against fixed-width... 

Definitely.  This is a concern on Sputnik too (
http://sputnik.freewisdom.org/en/Ticket:000011 ).

> One thing you may want to do is make it more noticeable how you can edit 
> a page.  Its somewhat non-intuitive to have to click on the page title 
> to edit.

Yes, editing should be obvious if we do want pages to get edited :)

I also agree that the gray link color should go and that syntax
highlighting for Lua snippets should be added.  One of the Lua
lexers in http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaGrammar might be used.
A related request I've had for the current wiki was for syntax
highlighting of Lua snippets (e.g. for the LuaTutorial) and C
code.

The URLs have changed from, for example,
http://nanoki.luaquiz.com:1080/LuaPowerPatches to
http://nanoki.luaquiz.com:1080/lua-power-patches .  Granted,
the former redirects to the latter, but is there really a good
reason for changing link format?

Is there a way to insert a code block without indenting every
line?  This style of indenting code blocks is clean (as in POD)
in many cases, but if one has a large block of code, then one
needs to indent every line, and not all users may be using an
editor that can do that.

I miss having change log messages on the Recent (Changes) list
as well viewing the change history on an individual page.

I don't see any real use for the Date link and calendar (i.e.
looking up changes made on a certain date).  Wouldn't the Recent
link serve that purpose if it showed more history?  The Recent
link is more general since it shows changes made over an entire
range of dates.

The date of page change (e.g. "Published on Friday, February
8th 2008") maybe belongs at the bottom of the page in smaller
text (less prominent).  This date might not even have much
meaning anyway.  For example, someone could create the page
in 2002 using Lua 4.0, another could make a major revision
to Lua 5.0 in 2005, and yet another might in 2007 make a
minor spelling fix (but not update it to Lua 5.1).  On the
other hand, it does at least tell me that the page was not
updated in 2008.

The Index link is not strictly necessary since on the existing
wiki one obtains such a list by doing a search with the search
box empty (which works on Nanoki too), though that might not
be as obvious.

Nanoki allows a page to be assigned title different than the
page name.  For example, I changed the title of
http://nanoki.luaquiz.com:1080/SandBox from "Sand Box" to
"Sand Box Test".  When would these two names be different?

Overall, I like what I see with this Nanoki demo of the
lua-users pages.  I agree with the approach the current Perl
wiki and nanoki wiki generally use in that things are as simple
as possible, but no simpler.  Reasons for this include usability,
maintainability, and security validation.  Sputnik does seem to
allow greater extensibility, but I wonder, without having myself
studied it enough, whether those capabilities are needed for the
lua-users.org wiki as opposed to some other type of web
application service (e.g. LuaForge).