intro

I'm looking at ikiwiki both for my personal site but also as a team-documentation management system for a small-sized group of UNIX sysadmins.

  • my edits should appear either as 'Jon' (if I've used untrusted git push); 'jmtd.net', 'jmtd.livejournal.com', 'jmtd' if I've forgotten to set my local git config properly, or once upon a time 'alcopop.org/me/openid/' or 'jondowland'.
  • My homepage is powered by ikiwiki

I gave a talk at the UK UNIX User's Group annual Linux conference in 2008 about organising system administrator documentation. Roughly a third of this talk was discussing IkiWiki in some technical detail and suggesting it as a good piece of software for this task.

I am also working on some ikiwiki hacks:

I am mostly interested in ikiwiki usability issues:

  • the login page is unclear when multiple methods exist
  • backlinks onhover thing can go weird
  • CSS classes for links
  • adjust commit message for rename, remove

The following I have been looking at, but are on the back-burner:

  • an alternative approach to comments (see more flexible inline postform for one piece of the puzzle; http://dev.jmtd.net/comments/ for some investigation into making the post form more integrated); possibly also pagespec to disable ikiwiki directives
  • a system for managing todo lists (see also interactive todo lists and http://dev.jmtd.net/outliner/ for the current WIP).
  • a tag2 plugin, which does the same thing as tag, but does not sit on top of wikilinks, so does not result in bugs such as tagged() matching wikilinks. Code for this lives in my github tag2 branch: http://github.com/jmtd/ikiwiki

Penultimately, the following are merely half-formed thoughts:

  • adding and removing tags to pages via the edit form by ticking and unticking checkboxes next to a tag name (rather than entering the directive into the text of the page directly)
  • perhaps the same for meta
  • I'd like to make profiling ikiwiki in action very easy for newcomers. Perhaps even a plugin that created a file /profile or similar on build.

backlinks

Finally, backlinks (since I have issues with the current backlinks implementation, see backlinks onhover thing can go weird):