Changes? Not Really

28 Feb 2010 17:36

As announced on Wikidot blog, CEO of Wikidot.com is changing. The position of CEO of Wikidot has been hold by Pieter Hintjens, now changed by Michał Frąckowiak, the founder of Wikidot service.

Pieter was the Wikidot front-man for its community and organized good workflow for many community and internal projects. We learned how to talk to the community, how to solve problems and how to concentrate on important things. And we're going to keep being good at it.

With the addition of data forms Wikidot becomes one of the most interesting wiki platfarms (platform + farm) on the Earth. Using ListPages, _templates and forms we allow (almost) regular folks to create applications like CMS for their co-workers, clients or friends. Things usually done by programmers are now available for smart guys without need to find proper hosting, web framework or writing a line of computer code.

What I find most interesting in building applications on Wikidot is that the platform itself is quite bullet-proof. I mean when you forget to put semicolon at the end of some line, you don't get your application crashing because of syntax error. Moreover when making application you get storage with history and e-mail notifications about changes for free, which makes your data quite safe. In case someone destroys your site (which you are informed by e-mail), you can just revert the right version).

But Wikidot applications is not the most important thing Wikidot is used for. Many sites on Wikidot are just plain wiki sites with links to store and share knowledge of certain groups. They don't use advanced features like modules, includes, templates. They usually edit and save :-) from time to time uploading some file or image. What we want to do is to review all common operations people do most often and (really really) simplify them. Sophisticated applications are worth nothing if basic usage of service is not easy.

We want to introduce features people will appreciate, like [[html]] blocks for embedding completely custom HTML, like this:

[[html]]
<h1>Custom HTML</h1>
<p>Something else</p>
<img src="anything.png" alt="hello ;-)"/>
[[/html]]

This code will just inject the HTML (including JavaScript) into the page in that place. Seems easy to do, but in fact, to make it safe for your site, we needed to implement this as a frame, that autoresizes to keep the content fit inside.

We also want to introduce [[block]] syntax for sandboxing wiki texts, for example:

[[block]]
What put inside is parsed and rendered independently, so even if you put some random [[/div]]s or other nasty things, the page outside will be rendered nicely.
[[/block]]

This will be useful for site designers to use in template pages, like this:

[[table]]
[[row]]
[[cell]]

[[block]]
%%content%%
[[/block]]

[[/cell]]
[[cell]]
some other things.
[[/cell]]
[[/row]]
[[/table]]

Putting %%content%% in block tags you make sure user won't break the original layout (the table). Without block, user could put [[/cell]] inside of his text and thus break the layout.

To let our users know what happens on their sites, we want to make live feeds of activity available for most common start-places on the web — iGoogle, NetVibes, Facebook and Twitter. Most important news from YOUR sites will be next to other things you start your day from.

We have a bunch of other fresh ideas, which we'll be sharing on blog.wikidot.com.

Next post: Maj


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