ingredients of wiki page

one of the recognized needs when reusing content at ubc is to clearly credit the department that authored the content as well as to display other pockets of information such as related links, contact info, department logo etc.
originally, we played with idea of building the extension so that user could enter this info, but we settled on much simpler, wikipedia-like approach – to use regular page elements to describe any sort of meta-data. for example, to display related links we would simply create new section of the page called “related link” and add content there. this seems like very simple and effective way to address this requirement.

syndication model - part of the page

in addition to syndicating the whole page we are looking into ways to republish parts of the page.

there are two ways to do this:
- using <feed> text </feed> plug in that uses tag to enclose the parts of texts that need to be republished
http://jimbojw.com/wiki/index.php?title=WikiArticleFeeds_Extension or
- push the content from under each of the subheadings only.

we’ll also provide the feed of recent changes (standard mediawiki feature) and other standard feeds.
both of these approaches have potential problems : <feed> could be easily broken or edited by different users (intersecting <feed> tags). pushing the content from within the certain subheading automatically does not have this kind of problem but it could be broken if the given section is renamed or page is reordered.
in order to use this functionalities we would have to build system that will notify the user when their part of page has been changed or deleted. tbd.
we’ll also provide the feed of recent changes (standard mediawiki feature) and other standard feeds.

syndication model - the whole page

ubc wiki, built on the top of mediawiki will provide various ways to republish content; any page on the site will be available for republishing and subscription through these formats:
- rss(RSS 2.0 format)
- json (javascript)
- raw html
- mediawiki api

ubc wiki

we are finally getting close to having our vmware environment (hosted by University IT) ready.
we do have big plans about this wiki. quite megalomanic, actually.
we want it to be ubc's coolest website, robust content management/publishing system, intelligent course management system along with first ever usable learning object repository, e-portfolio that actually makes sense, and possibly few other things along the way (you name them)

in the next few blog entries i will try to tackle few important decision points and how we may forward with those.