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2007-08-21 13:42

Frantic

Registered: Mar 2003
Posts: 1627

codebase navigation and structure

Hello!

I just did some experimenting with various plugins for the wiki used at http://codebase64.org in order to get an overview of possibilities.

I'd like some feedback on this:

At the moment a sidebar menu plugin is activated. In order to make that one a little bit more useable (try clicking on "base" in that menu) I guess one would have to organize articles a bit more into "namespaces", like the current ones "base", "link", "magazines", but on a sub-level (like "base:hardwaredetection", so the menu would be able to sort things out a little bit better.

BUT, what I am thinking about now is: Is that actually a good idea or not? It would enforce a kind of "hierachical" structure on the wiki which might not really be there (but you can still crosslink to articles between different namespaces). In some cases it would make it even more work to add a new page to the wiki, if the page would be in a new category, since a new namespace would have to be created. (It isn't really difficult, but maybe things are complicated enough already.) After all, I think it is important not to scare people away who wants to add stuff to the wiki. Also, people might remember that there were more different kinds of namespaces on the wiki before, but that these were merged because the distinctions they we're based on felt artificial and counterproductive. Something like this might happen again if one would try to organize the contents into sub-namespaces.

On the other hand, I think navigation in the wiki has been a bit awkward so far, and a menu like that is surely a bit tempting at least.

What do you think?

//FTC

2007-08-22 10:59

Frantic

Registered: Mar 2003
Posts: 1627

No replies? :) Am I aloooooone on this planet? Heeeelllo?

Well, seriously I understand that this matter is way to boring for you guys to give a shit about, but for me it is a bit of a problem. Basically it has to do with resolving two things:

1. The structure of the contents (which is not strictly hierarchical).
2. The struture of the navigation, which benefits from hierarchical structure.

At least this becomes an issue since dokuwiki does not support category-tagging of material, so the same document can be in several categories. (And thus the menu plugins that exist can't be generated automatically based on that sort of data.)

Any ideas? Perhaps it would even be best to migrate to mediawiki or so? (Even though I think it seems quite bloated.) That would require some work, transferring all the contents and so on, of course...

What I'd like to know from you guys is weather you also found the nagivigation (and overview) of the site a bit awkward, and/or whether you think dokuwiki seem to work well for the purpose in general.

//FTC

2007-08-22 13:34

Jayce
Account closed

Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 39

Patience young skywalker patience... Let is grow, it takes time.

You are building a good functional wiki here who's foundation is build with volunteer's mortal. Just let it grow, and then start restructing it. The current codebase is more then enough for a wiki, it now needs to be filled with article's and code.

2007-08-22 17:18

Oswald

Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 5017

Frantic, I think that treeview is a good idea. and you can fix any added article later, if the volunteer is not able to :) I dont quite get why the tree view is only 1 level deep, when there's a structure while navigating the old way, then again I dont get the namespaces and any other deeper wiki concept either.

2007-08-22 17:59

Burglar

Registered: Dec 2004
Posts: 1031

jayce is right, but, for what its worth, the treeview is pretty damn slow and unorganized on top of it.

the current structure is pretty great, maybe needs some ordering in some parts (for example based on amount of hits), but thats just a minor detail.

so, keep it up ;)

2007-08-22 20:12

Frantic

Registered: Mar 2003
Posts: 1627

@Oswald: at the moment there are only three namespaces... base, magazines and links. In order to get some structure in the tree view one would have to add sub-namespaces.. that is, to place math stuff under base:math:xxx instead of directly in base:xxx, and so on. The tree view would use this automatically then.

@Burglar: of course the tree view is unorganized... that is what the discussion is all about. If a tree view is worth the extra effort one would have to put into organizing the contents accordingly.

Anyway... I just thought about actually creating a custom hardcoded menu to the left instead of a autogenerated one. I think it would be easy enough for a small wiki like this. After all, it's not like people post 1000 new articles each day that would require a lot of restructuring of the overall structure. This would also resolve all kinds of possible tensions between info structure and navigation, since you're free to do it just like you want it to when not generating the menu automatically.

EDIT: ...and I did that now:

http://codebase64.org/doku.php

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