Use Mod Wiki

What is Use Mod Wiki?

Read it here: www.usemod.com


Also see Meat Ball (at www.usemod.com ), which is the largest wiki using Use Mod Wiki...

Use Mod Wiki 1.0.4 is now available, adding features like RSS feeds, file uploading, CSS classes, and better compatibility with 8-bit charsets. -- Clifford Adams


BTW: What is the motivation for the Subpages mod? I think there is a strong argument on Wiki Name Advantages for Constrained names reduce the need for guesswork. -- Eric Herman

I agree that constrained names are valuable - this is the one reason that I allow only one level of subpages. (The advantages of Wiki Names are also the reason I decided against arbitrary link names like some other wikis.) Deep hierarchies create arguments over classifications. In many cases, subpages should simply replace the current wiki method of using a Long-Prefix-Before-Each-Subpage. (See Component Design Patterns or Extreme Programming Challenge for samples.)

The main motivation is to provide topics more freedom to grow. Many wiki topics have grown beyond the comfortable boundaries of a single wiki page. Keeping summaries and discussions together creates huge pages, and leads to tension between Thread Mode and Document Mode. Refactoring into completely separate pages often seems to harm the coherence of the ideas. I hope that subpages will allow more thorough discussion and exploration of ideas, while making it easier for people to find or avoid topics depending on their interests.

Another way to look at it is that the "top-level" wiki space is a commons, where pages compete for people's attention. When there are "too many" top-level pages about a topic, people complain about a Tragedy Of The Commons (or just leave). "Too many" varies by interest, and the perceived focus of the community. When patterns were the focus of the PPR, XP was an intruder. When XP and general development topics became common, much of the pattern community left. Subpages would make every topic a potential wiki in itself, and (I hope) greatly expand the wiki commons of people's tolerance. (See Appropriate Wiki Topics)

One potential subpage benefit is that people could greatly expand their personal pages without intruding on the public view. I'm considering a prefix like "HidePage_" which would hide a subpage from the default Recent Changes. People could put bookmarks, unfinished pages, or anything of limited public interest there. Only those who want to read these pages would see them.

I don't know if any real communities will like subpages. (Subpage support is a configurable option in Use Mod Wiki.) If anyone is still interested, more details about subpages can be found at www.usemod.com . -- Clifford Adams [Now (October 2000) one of the most active Use Mod Wiki sites uses Sub Pages frequently.]



Comments

After playing with and installing a whole bunch of wikis, I ended up choosing the use Use Mod because (a) installation was extremely simple (standard Perl cgi-bin app with flat-file data storage and little configuration requried); (b) its feature set is nice, but not overwhelming. I would definitely recommend Use Mod highly in terms of ease of installation and basic plain-goodness of basic features (along with a few nice extras). On the down side, the code is not modular at all, and there is no template system--the display of the HTML is simply coming from print() statements within the main script. So making large changes is hard. And an attempt I made to rewrite something was frustrating because the code is so non-modular. It feels like a one-person coding project. I would still like to find one that was template based, as well as perhaps a little more obvious interface for the newbies (Use Mod is fine... just that the newbies can be so picky.)

-- Chris Burbridge

You may be interested in Infinite Monkey.

See original on c2.com