cymba
09-09-2007, 05:22 AM
First off let me say that so far I'm very impressed with DekiWiki, Its the easiest wiki I've had the pleasure to evaluate.
I've been using and adding content to it for about a week and so far here are my observations...
1) It'd be nice to be able to attach images etc while in the editor. Currently I have to remember to attach all the images I might possibly need BEFORE I edit the page. I'm guessing its designed this way because u pass a list of all attachments to the editor when its invoked.
2) Moving of pages is a little cumbersome right now.
More -> Move, wait for stuff to load, type in new location or browse to it, click -> Move Page.
For one or two thats ok but it became a pain when I was trying to move a number of related pages into their own category page to get around the alphabetical-sorting-only limitation. What might be better is a way to move the page via icons on the hierarchy bar on the left, or a UI section to allow mass moves. I also noticed that bug about blank stub pages being created when moving a page with a sub page.
3) Table handling is a little cumbersome, there's no way to select an entire column for selection, there's Row Properties but not column. I still have yet to find an easy way to move the column divider to a specific width other than going into the HTML. Also when choosing Table colors it would be great if the element highlighted the CURRENT color on the color picker. Sometimes I'm trying to find just the right blue and it'd be great if when I went to change it it would highlight the position of the current selection. It'd make it faster to get to the color u want for the table element.
4) A preview mode would be great. The editor is good but it doens't show you exactly what the page is going to look like when you click save. So I usually end up saving quite often to see if I'm happy with a particular layout/color etc, or to see how the rendered page.toc looks etc. Ofcourse this updates the versioning for each page which really reduces its effectiveness. Since when I go to the changes, it might just be filled with changes on the scale of 1 letter/word or the positioning of a box/color etc for the first whole page. A preview mode would allow me to see what the final page would look like w/o clogging up the versions with trivial changes. When I'm happy with the fully rendered preview then I'd click save. I should check to see if this sends out a watch notification for each of these minor changes as well.
5) As stated before; a depth param for the wiki.tree function
Right now I find myself creating complex page elements (complex multi-column tables, right hand page element boxes etc ) in dreamweaver or something then pasting the resultant HTML in a template for use by the other users.
I'm also really looking forward to parametized templates (wiki.template) for the Hayes++ release.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the capabilities of DekiScript and I'm trying to figure out how to use the API to create my own plugins as well.
Great work so far guys :)
EDIT : Just remembered this. A quick insert link to get back to the top of the page. I usually put a page.toc on top of pages to give a quick overview of whats on the page and links to get to them but there's no quick insertion element for a link back to the top of the page from each section.
I've been using and adding content to it for about a week and so far here are my observations...
1) It'd be nice to be able to attach images etc while in the editor. Currently I have to remember to attach all the images I might possibly need BEFORE I edit the page. I'm guessing its designed this way because u pass a list of all attachments to the editor when its invoked.
2) Moving of pages is a little cumbersome right now.
More -> Move, wait for stuff to load, type in new location or browse to it, click -> Move Page.
For one or two thats ok but it became a pain when I was trying to move a number of related pages into their own category page to get around the alphabetical-sorting-only limitation. What might be better is a way to move the page via icons on the hierarchy bar on the left, or a UI section to allow mass moves. I also noticed that bug about blank stub pages being created when moving a page with a sub page.
3) Table handling is a little cumbersome, there's no way to select an entire column for selection, there's Row Properties but not column. I still have yet to find an easy way to move the column divider to a specific width other than going into the HTML. Also when choosing Table colors it would be great if the element highlighted the CURRENT color on the color picker. Sometimes I'm trying to find just the right blue and it'd be great if when I went to change it it would highlight the position of the current selection. It'd make it faster to get to the color u want for the table element.
4) A preview mode would be great. The editor is good but it doens't show you exactly what the page is going to look like when you click save. So I usually end up saving quite often to see if I'm happy with a particular layout/color etc, or to see how the rendered page.toc looks etc. Ofcourse this updates the versioning for each page which really reduces its effectiveness. Since when I go to the changes, it might just be filled with changes on the scale of 1 letter/word or the positioning of a box/color etc for the first whole page. A preview mode would allow me to see what the final page would look like w/o clogging up the versions with trivial changes. When I'm happy with the fully rendered preview then I'd click save. I should check to see if this sends out a watch notification for each of these minor changes as well.
5) As stated before; a depth param for the wiki.tree function
Right now I find myself creating complex page elements (complex multi-column tables, right hand page element boxes etc ) in dreamweaver or something then pasting the resultant HTML in a template for use by the other users.
I'm also really looking forward to parametized templates (wiki.template) for the Hayes++ release.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the capabilities of DekiScript and I'm trying to figure out how to use the API to create my own plugins as well.
Great work so far guys :)
EDIT : Just remembered this. A quick insert link to get back to the top of the page. I usually put a page.toc on top of pages to give a quick overview of whats on the page and links to get to them but there's no quick insertion element for a link back to the top of the page from each section.