It’s been a while since my last wiki-addin development update. That’s partly because I’m deep in debugging & degunking existing code, and partly because I’ve been working on my literature review and methodology. Oh, and in my defense, it’s also due to the fact that I work full-time and work on a PhD in spare moments and weekends...
At this point, there are only two features/issues that I need to correct before declaring a finished version. The first is a bug with permissions, the second providing RSS feeds for page edits and comments. Although I’m always overly enthusiastic in scheduling, I think both will be wrapped up this weekend.
After a week of testing and packing, I’ll release a package suitable for installation. There will probably be some undiscovered bugs, but they should be relatively minor. There are still ease of use issues that I’d like to work with, especially in the areas of easily uploading pictures and linking to blog posts, files, and pages. However, those will need to wait for another release.
In any case, the thrust of this post is to reassure people that I’ll be releasing an installable & usable version of my add-in by August 27th. I’m sure that there will be a number of bug fixes after that date, but they’ll be kind of thing that are easy to deploy and manage without taking down a bunch of servers or experimenting with new functionality.
On a somewhat related note, it’s encouraging to see that Aperto (http://www.aperto-elearning.com/?q=node/24) has released code to link MediaWiki & Elgg. They’ve taken a very different route to integrating wiki-functionality into Elgg, and the overall community is only going to be stronger as result. I really don’t see the two different wiki approaches as competing against each other. Aperto’s project is much more of a traditional wiki. Users will have standard wiki markup, a global namespace, and access to a ton of heavy-duty features. In contrast, my add-in uses a richtext editor, has namespaces local to the owner, a more hierarchical structure, and commenting. The former solution is suited to a site where everyone is working together on a single project. Mine is focused at providing simple collaboration and publication for non-technical users.
For those people interested in checking out a working copy of my add-in, feel free to hop on over to http://claremontconversation.org/tcourse/garrettn/page for a look. I’m always open for feedback and comments… For those who want access to the code, visit http://sl2.cgu.edu/admin/websvn. My group also has some of our code for claremontconversation, but go to /_folio/readme.txt for information on how to install the svn code on an Elgg box.
