From: Martin DeMello <martindemello@...>
Date: 2006-12-04T03:46:32+09:00
Subject: rubygarden wiki

I was a bit hesitant to post this, since it is mostly complaining, but
I really think the RubyGarden wiki is long overdue for a facelift. The
major problems I have (in no particular order):

1. Ugly background colour. This is not as minor an issue as it may
seem - I feel actively reluctant to spend too long browsing the wiki.
Yes, I can click my "zap colour" bookmarklet every time I browse to a
page (which is what I mostly end up doing), or even write a
greasemonkey script to fix it once and for all, but I think the wiki
should look good out of the box. Incidentally, I did an informal
search, and every other language wiki I could find has a white
background.

1a. Alternate stylesheets. Would fix problem 1, for a start, and
provide lots of other nice features, settable on a per-user basis.

2. Poor code support. Given that there are wikis that can syntax
highlight code, we really should be using one. Automatic numbering
would be nice too.

3. Lack of management features for complex pages, like section locking
(would be nice to have particularly important pages have sections that
can't be defaced), internal hyperlinks and folding (see Wikipedia for
example)

4. Lack of navigation features. A sidebar with all the categories
would be a huge plus, for instance, and would encourage people to
categorise their pages.

5. Lack of eye candy and cool features (this is a programmer's wiki,
after all, and we like to play with stuff!!)

Off the top of my head, I'd suggest a shift to mediawiki - lots of
projects are using it, and it has extensive plugin and skin support.
(I don't believe that the wiki not being written in ruby detracts from
anything).

martin