Topic: Group Wiki Plugin (not a release, but in progress)

Group Wiki Plugin (not a release, but in progress)

D Cartwright
Participant

@aekeron

14 years, 11 months ago

Hi,

For a project I’m currently working on I’m co-developing a group wiki plugin implementation. This builds on the work already done by the CUNY Academic Commons guys (I used their instructions for user integration and have updated their wiki activity plugin to support BP1.2 and better filtering) but we wanted to make the wiki feel more like a group component than a standalone wiki with nothing more in common with BP than a shared user base.

As such, it will work like so:

Built for BuddyPress 1.2 (using the new theme, once it hits trac)

Each group can create a number of wiki pages on creation.

These pages are tied to the group so only those within the group can edit them (and further security settings allow for control of viewing outside of the group).

The wiki editing and viewing is all done within the buddypress site (as per the other group components).

Integrated FCKEditor for wiki editing.

Most backend functions hidden from the users initially.

Global wiki directory that will work in a similar way to the current group directory and link to the group wiki homepage for each group.

We’re hopfully adding a few other features to help group admins manage multiple groups/wikis at once too.

I guess that this won’t exactly match up to what everyone wants from a wiki plugin but our current needs are to provide a better environment for our students to perform group work online. Buddypress has been really beneficial for student communication but without a better wiki integration we are starting to struggle to support decent collaborative projects…Hopefully this will address that.

Our deadline for the project is end of Jan/Feb and hopefully I’ll be able to release an early alpha version to testers before that (if anyone is interested?).

Viewing 25 replies - 1 through 25 (of 48 total)

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Jean-Pierre Michaud
Participant

@nexia

14 years, 11 months ago

hum, question here, your choice of editor for the wiki, was it made against the original WP/WPMU/BP editor for some reasons???

Paul Wong-Gibbs
Keymaster

@djpaul

14 years, 11 months ago

Have you implemented your own Wiki or do you an existing one behind the scenes?

D Cartwright
Participant

@aekeron

14 years, 11 months ago

@DJPaul

We’re using mediawiki at the moment. I was considering just creating a basic wiki from scratch (as I belive it would be a similar amount of work and achieve a better result) but other people involved in the project thought it was best to stick with the already partially integrated mediawiki due to the time constraints on the project… Which is fair enough, we’re running in quite a tight timeframe.

@nexia

The reason we’ve gone for fck is that it’s available as a plugin to mediawiki already. It wouldn’t be my first choice if it weren’t for that.

Unfortunately there are a lot of constraints on what we can do due to limited time and work-based politics. We’ve had to fight hard to not be stuck using Confluence wiki within Blackboard, despite the fact that the student take up in just 4 months has literally been 300 times greater in our first Buddypress system compared to a similar attempt using Blackboard. (changed wording a little to make it slightly more anonymous)

Boone Gorges
Keymaster

@boonebgorges

14 years, 11 months ago

Wow, wow, wow.

Please let me know if there’s any way I can help, be it in development, bug-fixing, testing, whatever. Real integration with MW would be killer in my community (even more so if you could set privacy settings on group wiki pages that corresponded to group privacy settings, but that’s quite hard to do with MW), so I’d be happy to devote some of my time to getting this plugin off the ground.

Jean-Pierre Michaud
Participant

@nexia

14 years, 11 months ago

the problem i see with mediawiki is that all the existing platforms already try to have a complete integration with it, and they all fail… i would personally see a different way of thinking… using the default WP editor, which already contain hierachical/historical revisions history of all posts… with that, you simply need to add the proper wiki bbcodes inside the editor, which are available as plugins or can be created, which would simplify the integration…

abcde666
Participant

@erich73

14 years, 11 months ago

I like the idea of having a Wiki based on Groups.

Definitely I am very interested in using it !

Thanks !

D Cartwright
Participant

@aekeron

14 years, 11 months ago

I’ll comment more later but I completely agree with you nexia. I’m possibly going to go that route with a seperate plugin developed in my own time..

Paul Wong-Gibbs
Keymaster

@djpaul

14 years, 11 months ago

I’d be interested in working on a Wiki-type system for BuddyPress.

D Cartwright
Participant

@aekeron

14 years, 11 months ago

Perhaps we should think about what exactly we want it to do – I’d love to work together as long as we all have a solid plan for features/etc

I’ve probably not explained our feature set that well above (and to be honest, it’s still in a state of flux) but it closely matches what I would like to do in a ‘proper’ wiki inplementation. I guess I basically want it to be very buddypress-groups-focussed and I also have a strong aversion to the WP backend so ideally all editing will be done within the buddypress frontend.

D Cartwright
Participant

@aekeron

14 years, 11 months ago

@Boone Gorges

Initially I wanted to have the wiki pages privacy completely controlled by the group privacy level but unfortunately we have a need to be able to ‘unhide’ individual wiki pages so in the implementation we’re working on pages will be individually controlled via the group wiki admin page.

@nexia

As stated above, I completely agree. Whilst the work we’re doing at the moment will involve mediawiki I think it’s highly likely that I’ll simultaneously (though at a much slower pace) work on something similar to you’re describing in your last post.

Jean-Pierre Michaud
Participant

@nexia

14 years, 11 months ago

that’s usually how things work in the market… you code for your needs, and then you code for pleasure… L)

bpisimone
Participant

@bpisimone

14 years, 11 months ago

Well here’s another tester for you! While I am very excited for this to happen, I also agree (with my very limited coding abilities) that an actual bp built wiki would probably work better for everyone.

It’s a pity that I need those things very soon. But yeah, keep me informed for sure!

D Cartwright
Participant

@aekeron

14 years, 11 months ago

@nexia

Lol. Good point

I just wish I had more time for pleasure rather than it all being taken up by ‘real’ work

D Cartwright
Participant

@aekeron

14 years, 11 months ago

@Bpisimone

Hopefully I’ll be able to get something vaguely useful out of the door in early January. I’ll definitely keep everyone updated on here.

bpisimone
Participant

@bpisimone

14 years, 11 months ago

That sounds like something I could maybe work with

David Lewis
Participant

@takeo

14 years, 11 months ago

This would be great. I’d also prefer a simple purpose-built solution that leverages the tools already built into WordPress… but any solution would be awesome at this point.

Leah
Participant

@gezan

14 years, 11 months ago

@D Cartwright

Why not make a joint venture right from the start?

Since you have a tight timeframe and, I believe, there are lots of interest in a, as you say, ‘proper’ ‘wiki-type’ plugin from the BP community, it’s would be wasting time and resources not. Setting a solid plan for time and features you would surely attract serious BP devs and ui folks @Boone Gorges, @nexia, @DJPaul. And maybe @Jeff Sayre will adapt his privacy component.

Cheers, G

Jean-Pierre Michaud
Participant

@nexia

14 years, 11 months ago

hum, please do not list me until i put my name in a list… i already receive too much requests even if i never posted i was available for work… rofl

(my reputation goes way beyond my capabilities)

Xevo
Participant

@xevo

14 years, 11 months ago

Why not just use the already worked on wp wiki plugin which has the basics?

Xevo
Participant

@xevo

14 years, 11 months ago

Updating my previous post, if anyone is curious, a wikimedia styled wordpress theme was just released. Combined with my earlier plugin, you could already make a wordpress wikimedia for a normal install.

You can download it here.

D Cartwright
Participant

@aekeron

14 years, 11 months ago

@Xevo

Which other plugin are you talking about? Wikiwp looks like it could be something interesting to look at as a base…which I’ll do today. I’m not sure that modifying to it fit our spec will be any easier than the other approaches we’ve talked about though.

@Gezan

I’m sure everyone here will understand that I have to work to the requirements of the project first and foremost. All of us here are being paid to do this work and a late delivery would be a serious problem. Anyone ‘enlisted’ on this site would be a volunteer so it would be unreasonable to expect the same kind of full-time hours/timeframe from them.

I would love to do this ‘properly’ from the start but sadly we need to get something that works out of the door fairly quickly, even if it isn’t perfect in our eyes.

Fairweb
Participant

@fairweb

14 years, 11 months ago

According to your project’s requirements, why do you absolutely need to develop a wiki ? I understand that you want easy writting facilities so why not using blogs ? Of course, there would be a lot to build in the group’s front end but at least you can use WP’s core functions.

1 – link a blog to a group, maybe using group meta (and make it private if needed) and give group users certain rights on blog.

2 – build a front-end tool for groups to be able to view, add pages and create content

3 – the post revisions could be useful to have full history of the page

Of course, work has to be done on user’s roles and capabilities to be able to view revisions and edit contents as non admin users.

This is just an idea, I don’t know if this could match your requirements.

D Cartwright
Participant

@aekeron

14 years, 11 months ago

@Fairweb

Our first stage actually worked in quite a similar way to that which you’re describing, minus some of the functionality.

Part of the reason we’re now using a wiki is purely down to the way that people get excited when you talk about wikis when compared to other tools. This has led to more funding for further development… I’m sure you’ve run into similar situations before

D Cartwright
Participant

@aekeron

14 years, 11 months ago

@Fairweb and @Xevo

I’ve discussed these options with the team and it looks like we’ll be moving more in this direction if our investigation goes well. Thanks for the input

Will get back later with more info…

Xevo
Participant

@xevo

14 years, 11 months ago

Glad to help out, been working with wp wiki plugin for a while now and I’m using it as a movie/series database which members can adjust. Working great.

I’m thinking that you can auto create a blog when a group is formed and automatically link that blog to the group. Then make that blog the wiki. If it works out easily than only thing left to do is change the wiki plugin to your own/clients preferences.