BJayaram
I needed a simple text based wiki that supports content reuse and I found this wiki.
Hopefully, I will figure out how all the various config options work and have a wiki site soon.
There has been quite a lot of traffic on the mailing list relating to usability issues. I think one of the main problems with Pmwiki is that it has a lot of flexibility which makes it difficult to write documentation that addresses all the various roles, features, issues, processes that may be involved in order to use Pmwiki effectively.
To a newcomer (in whatever role), everything involves learning the terminology first. There being no taxonomy to help guide the reader, and there being lots of links to follow, the newcomer initially gets lost in the documentation. So, one of the first things that needs to happen, IMHO, is a clear articulation of the concepts within Pmwiki and how they are related. An ontology could be created to capture the concepts, properties and relationships but it will probably go over many people's heads. Instead of an ontology, one could use wikitrails to introduce the concepts, tasks and related references in a logical order, given a topic.
For example, given the topic of "Installation", there should be a wikitrail that introduces one to the concepts, the tasks and the references that are part of the topic. At the end of the trail, suggestions as to what other trails are related to the "Installation" trail must be listed.
In order to reuse as much as possible, each group can have a page called Concepts, Tasks and References which contain anchors that help to delineate sections that can be pulled into other pages as required.
Here is the basic organization of groups and pages:
Pmwiki/
Concept (alphabetically organized concepts in sections) Task Reference
On the Pmwiki Installation page, the content would be as follows:
Pmwiki Release
(:include Pmwiki.Concept#ReleaseStart#ReleaseEnd:)
In order to clear up the documentation confusion, I have been thinking that what might help is to write down, for each of the audience and description levels, a list of concepts and the order in which they might be arranged in a trail sort of like below. Where a page exists, I have put the pagename. Some long pages may have to be split up and some new pages will have to be created.
AuthorsBasicTrail
Wiki PmWiki.WikiWikiWeb
PmWikiPage (this could be a trail of its own)
Introduction
What does a simple page look like?
How does PmWiki render a page?
What can exist in a Wiki Page?
Introduction to Markup PmWiki.MarkupMasterIndex
(provide a link to Advanced Markup page of AuthorsIntermediateTrail)
Editing a Page PmWiki.BasicEditing
Creating a New Page
Fancying up the presentation PmWiki.TextFormattingRules
Text Formatting
Colors
Boxes
Table layouts
Skins?
Including content from other pages
Changing Page Attributes (is this required?)
WikiGroup PmWiki.WikiGroup
Why use Groups?
Notifications
Can I get notified when a page changes?
Customization Basics
What is local/config.php? How to customize Pages? How to customize Groups?
Searching
Simple Pagelist examples (only covering topics already introduced)
AuthorsIntermediateTrail
PmWikiPage (this could be a trail of its own)
Forms
What more can exist in a Wiki Page?
Intermediate Markup (e.g., PageVariables etc.)
(provide a link to Advanced Markup page of AuthorsAdvancedTrail)
Editing a Page
Emacs mode
wbloggar
XMLRPC
Fancying up the presentation
Text Formatting
Advanced Table layouts
Setting skins
Changing Page Attributes
WikiGroup PmWiki.WikiGroup
??
Customization Basics
Intermediate stuff in local/config.php How to customize Pages? How to customize Groups?
Searching
Intermediate Pagelist examples (only covering topics already introduced)