Re: [Modcaml] Evaluating Cocanwiki

[Richard Jones]

On Fri, Jul 08, 2005 at 03:12:37PM -0700, Martin Jambon wrote:
> - what are the main reasons which led to the development of Cocanwiki,
> besides demonstrating that OCaml can be used at least to power its own
> websites?

There were two reasons: We were trying to create a more usable wiki -
cocanwiki contains some innovations in this area, notably in
navigation, but for general usability there is still some way to go.
Secondly we wanted a Wiki written in OCaml for the OCaml advocacy site
at wiki.cocan.org.

> - are there any plans of adding lots of features (until it becomes the
> best wiki engine)? or should we just use Mediawiki? (I did not try to
> install any wiki software yet, so I am very naive)
> 
> Additional features we would love to have are:
> - discussion pages (in parallel to each document page)
> - math (latex) formulas
> - automatic table of contents
> - automatic bibliography
> - preview before saving
> - user/contributor pages
> - visitor and contributor statistics (possibly public)
> - PDF export

Yes, I hear you!  These are all features we'd like too.

At the moment our policy is that if someone comes along and either
does the work, or funds Merjis to do the work, then we'll do it.
We've had irregular discussions with various external companies who
might fund this, but nothing concrete has happened yet.

> Actually all of this does no seem to be too difficult after all for an
> OCaml programmer. Any feature that depends on external software could be
> made optional.

The feature list above doesn't look too hard to me either.

> So is it a good idea if I start implementing these or should I just choose
> an existing wiki engine that already has almost everything but is not
> written in OCaml? What do you think?

That's up to you - see above.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com