Bazza Wiki

BazzaWiki is a WikiWiki clone I hacked up in a few hours, in Perl. Unfortunately it's not open to the public (it's on an intranet).

(snipped old text and added...)

I originally wrote about this when it used reflection to get the method names when translating some of the tagged text. My ideas on wiki changed a lot later, when I became head of a sysadmin group and had to put it to serious use to share large amounts of info in the team.

First off, while I really liked the Wiki way of setting up topics, its just too weird for the casual user. These were separated out first into a comma separated list elsewhere for editing. I used the topic list at one point to generate a bunch of buttons for navigating; this unnecessarily restricted the number of topics that were useful by taking up screen real estate, so now the users can choose the topic from a dropdown at the top of the screen. Choosing a topic generates the A-Z of the topic unless a page of the same name exists.

Theres another dropdown for choosing pages in the 'current' topic. (I just take this to mean the first topic listed for each page). Also, the search engine is visible on every page.

The most interesting changes though, are how external links are handled.

Each page is stored with an URL to the formatted version of the page, which is used when storing relative links inside the wiki database. If the page begins with an URL however, the page links directly to the URL given instead. The rest of the page is still usable by the program, however.

This has a couple of nice effects - if I name (eg) a URL 'Sun FAQ' using this mechanism, all links change simultaneously if I change the URL on the 'Sun FAQ' page. Secondly, I can make external pages searchable using the internal search engine by adding appropriate keywords to the rest of the text on the page which users never see. Giving a concrete example, a page might read:

'http://www.newscientist.com/ popular science magazine physics astronomy biology book reviews'

The sharper knives will have noticed that this means I never get to see a 'formatted' version of the page, which is normally where the Edit button lives. Instead, the A-Zs entries all have little icons beside them which lead to the editable versions.

I've continued experimenting by tweaking my code; I think there's much more mileage to be had in WikiWiki yet.

-- Bazza (mailto:Brian.Ewins@gssec.bt.co.uk)

CategoryWikiImplementation