This page is a summary of a discussion on the Instiki mailing list – Bart

k

Suggestions

• Use of plug-ins
  It is possible to use Engines to create plug-ins for instiki. In HowToUseEngines I describe how I have implemented the LoginEngine into instiki. So it seems feasible, and maybe not so hard to do, to convert all plugins from Pimki to Engines, and use them as plug-ins for Instiki. My next step is create an Engine myself, for instance an address book. Or a todo list. Be aware though, that all this is very early stuff. The automagic way to install Engines is not there yet…
  
  I read about Rails plugins and about Why engines and components are not evil but distracting. Especially the last one was inspiring… and there is thruth in there. It reminded me those lost hours of trying to make sth fit into your setup. And in the end, nothing worked, and you didn’t learn anything. Except for restarting Apache. By these small expirements on Rails, I learned more then I would have using merely engines. But then starters indeed need a description on how to build themselves a wiki (or a login application, or whatever) from scratch, showing the use of generators and the like. During the process of making the implementation they can tweak it immediately as they see fit. I prefer written text to a video, nvdr.
  
  However, then still I would like to have something like Engines. Not really to share, or not as the first purpose at least, but as a personal set of specific tasks, which you can reuse in other of your rails applications. It doesn’t make sense to go over the process over and over again…
  
  I will try to create such a page for the creation of a personal wiki… don’t hold your breath.
• Instiki wiki itself should be a plug-in
  This would require a top-level controller, Instiki++, which manages the plug-ins, including the wiki plug-in. Sounds feasible, on Engines they also mention a Wiki Engine, based on i2. Which brings us to the next point…
  
  Still true. In your own Engines repository…
• Unifying the different Ruby/Rails based wiki world
  Let’s keep in mind what Instiki is supposed to be. A personal / small project wiki that is ridiculously easy to install and start using. This actually means that there shouldn’t be many features in the “core” of it. I’m actually thinking about dropping some features, primarily Tex/PDF exports.
  That said, Rails now has the plugin architecture, and so it should be possible for people who want to create more features to package them as plugins. Alexey
  
  This is still possible using plug-ins. The package would contain a rails application containing a top-level manager, and then some basic plugins and configuration, such as the wiki-plugin, login, redcloth, ... You can still use the sqlite to simplify the install. But this does not mean that you disable the possibility to use for instance mysql. When the plugin script works properly (read: I did not manage to get it working), adding functionality should be easy.
  
  So if it sounds like a good idea to more people, everything is there to start, no? Instiki could be used as the top-level manager, as wiki there is either the i2 based Wiki Engine, or there is the current Instiki wiki which could be wrapped as Engine. And then there are the Pimki plugins, also to be converted to Engines. And in no time there is the new Instiki, easy to install in a basic pre-defined configuration, and easy to extend to a complex business project management system… and then I woke up.
  
  Well, not sure anymore…
• AJAX could be usefull to control the rendering of the plug-ins in the main page
  Ajax is nice, but it is not a full solution to everything. Pimki2 has a few bits of Ajax, and I think Alexey wants to do some for Instiki as well (for the fun of it :) . Am just not sure if it will solve these issues, or make things worse. Assaph
• Theming facilities
  This is quite important for me. Not as such the ‘theming’ part, but rather have an easy control over the layout, both the content and the look. Theming can become an interesting side-effect of that. I read a lot about this Edit Web stylesheet tweaking, but that is not enough, for sure (and I don’t like that anyway. I lack control there.). naiznoiz is an example of what I nowadays use as template for my Instikis. Every thing on the screen is a seperate .rhtml file, easy enabled or disabled. The first time you start the wiki, you will be prompted to create a menu, and from then on you can edit the menu by an additional navigation entry. No need to use include on each page anymore. In the default.rhtml, at the top, you can choose to use a logo, or to add a background picture instead of the classical look.
  
  For all this, there was no need to change any .rb file, so no controllers and such. The only thing to do is to copy the complete app/view directory and the instiki.css into your new instiki install dir. Oh, and I started commenting them, so my children will also understand in ten years…