Group Wiki Plugin (not a release, but in progress)
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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?).
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No worries. I would love to be involved in a project similar to your suggestion – so perhaps it’s something we can run parallel
@Boone Gorges
It’s looking like we’ll be going that route for now. I think we’re likely to end up with something far more useful (to start with) but I agree – there is definitely a call for a basic wiki plugin and something more fully-fledged…I’d like to be involved with the development of both :p
If you would like to chat about the development we did with mediwiki sometime I’d be happy to go through it with you and provide the partial code. It might be enough to provide a spark of interest/development attention from people. I will warn you that it’s in an awful state though – it’s just me playing with things and trying to get a rough solution working before later refining.
Just thought I’d give people an update.
1) As discussed, we moved to making use of inbuilt wordpress functions as much as possible and hence avoid the nightmare of trying to make mediawiki work in a way that is ‘nice’ with buddypress.
2) We’ve taken inspiration from the following plugins: front-end-editor, bp-groupblog and wp-wiki. We currently aren’t using any of the code from these, but many thanks to the authors of these plugins for their very informative code.
3) Work is progressing very nicely. Sadly we probably won’t have a working beta before xmas but I’m going to post up a few screenshots next week with some luck. In the meantime, here are two to whet your appetite slightly:
Group Wiki Create Screen
http://linktart.co.uk/_files_/dev/wiki1.png
Group Wiki Home Screen
http://linktart.co.uk/_files_/dev/wiki2.png
Please note: Our designer hasn’t re-styled these pages yet so bits of it look quite rough. Apologies about that. Functionality-wise we’re probably about 50% of the way there, with a few placeholders here and there until we can finish things.
Any thoughts? I realise that there isn’t exactly much to go on at the moment
I should also probably again mention that we were looking for quite a simple wiki plugin for our students, not a fully blown wiki system…
1. Lol, thank you
2. Yeah, the pages list definitely needs work. In some ways a vertical list would be nice/better but I’m not sure of the best way to do this. We were considering an ‘index page’ but I have concerns about the users needing extra clicks to get to places…so..hm.
I guess index + breadcrumb might work… Hmmmmmmm
I’d be fine with an index / directory page. That page could perhaps even use sorting / filtering (at some point) similar to the BuddyPress directory pages in the latest default theme… i.e. most active, most recent… my wikis, all wikis… etc. And if you’re leveraging WordPress functionality… another way to organize the wikis would be by tags and categories… perhaps with a sidebar widget and a dynamic directory page depending on which tag / category you click on. Lots of ideas
1 Thought so far. I love you too (and your team). More thoughts whenever we’ll see more of this
This is absolutely great news for everyone who wants to use buddypress in the fields of education. Thank u very much for sharing with us. Is it all working on the frontend, or does the user has to enter the wp-backend?
Thoughts:
1. A searchable “wiki” directoy page would great.
2. Tags would be great – with a sidebar tag cloud widget on the directory page.
3. I also like ur idea of vertical “page” listing.
What a great xmas present
Hi again,
Everything is done through the frontend – our students and academics absolutely hated the backend (and I tend to agree – at least in regards to buddypress doing pretty much everything through the frontend aside from blogs).
1. Wiki directory page is definitely on the cards but we’ve not started working on that yet. Probably something for the new year
2. Tags would be nice but I suspect something that will come later too sorry…
3. I’ll discuss the idea of a vertical page listing with people more next week. I suspect it’ll be put on the back-burner until we’ve got most of everything working properly though. (e.g. whatever the rest of the team have already partially completed will be the way we go for the next week or two).
Lol.. nice point regarding Joomla
We’ve said similar things in the past too. The WP backend is just a bit overwhelming for new users, despite it being a million miles better than Joomla’s.For our courses the students are likely to only have 2-5 wiki pages so our design has been with that in mind to start with. I agree that to be practical for other uses we need to change that though. I’ll see what we can do.
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