integration of a wiki into Tracks

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Migrated from the original issue #17 at https://www.assembla.com/spaces/tracks-tickets/tickets/17

Would it be possible to add a Wiki section into Tracks? That would make it an all-in-one webapp for me to use as a single data collection inbox.

Originally reported by Anonymous on April 4, 2005 at 07:15:21 (+0100)

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On April 4, 2005 at 18:46:55 (+0100), Anonymous commented:

It's a good idea. I'd been thinking about something on the same lines myself, though it may not happen for a while. The tricky bit is thinking how to make it integrated without causing the whole interface to be bloated. If it was just going to be a wiki available from the Tracks interface then it could probably just use any wiki engine, but I think it would be nicer to make it fit in a little more.

This system, Trac, has nice integration between the wiki parts and the more structured parts (timeline, changesets, source etc.). You can put special wiki links in to link to a particular ticket for example. It would be nice to have something like that, with special links to take you to a particular next action, context or project.

I've marked it for the 1.1 milestone because I think it will need a fair bit of work. Thanks for the input!

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On June 6, 2005 at 17:27:58 (+0100), Anonymous commented:

A personal opinion follows.

Tracks: a good idea. Wiki: a good idea. Wiki in Tracks: not so sure about this. As long as it's very loosely coupled, maybe. But, why?

Why not do one thing well?

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On July 7, 2005 at 02:33:55 (+0100), bsag commented:

Another personal opinion follows:

There are tons of wiki's to choose from and they are easy to implement. Why pick one and spend a lot of time integrating it?

As long as tracks make it easy to link to specific next actions etc, any given wiki could implement a map for its own wikiwords to tracks.

So not sure about wiki in tracks either.

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On September 9, 2005 at 23:39:25 (+0100), Anonymous commented:

May be a good an example for such integration between a wiki and a todos manager will be the Pimki?

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On October 10, 2005 at 01:00:42 (+0100), Anonymous commented:

Maybe another approach would be for the Tracks community to identify a wiki that works well with Tracks, and document the setup and integration.

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On October 10, 2005 at 01:06:09 (+0100), Anonymous commented:

I use Instiki and Tracks together running off the same USB key on both WindowsXP and MacOSX. This works pretty well actually - I don't really see the need for a wiki inside of Tracks.

The only issues I run up against is when I run Tracks together with some of the later versions of Instiki (like instiki-ar, the active-record version of instiki). It seems that the session cookie used by tracks also gets used by Instiki, resulting in "page not found" errors in Instiki. This is common to many attempts to run two different rails apps concurrently on the same host - but I'm hoping that there must be a way to do the session cookies in such a way that they don't "collide" with those used byy another Rails app. (This is probably better requested in a rails forum, as it is perhaps something every Rails developer should probably look at.)

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On October 10, 2005 at 02:39:43 (+0100), Anonymous commented:

just wanted to point your attention onto "LesserWiki":http://www.lesserwiki.org/ - I stumbled over it accidently...

What I like is that it seems to be a nice "TiddlyWiki":http://www.tiddlywiki.com/ port (I already tried a different server side PHP port of it) and that it uses Ajax.

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On October 10, 2005 at 20:10:22 (+0100), Anonymous commented:

I agree to Robert, please don't make a bloated "i can do everything, but nothing well" application, tracks is just too beautiful !

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On December 12, 2005 at 10:51:21 (+0000), Anonymous commented:

I think it is a fine idea. i think it would be a good project plan space.

the tricky part is the integration. with project notes in 1.04 and the wiki plan in the works... how to make it all work well elagantly and without redundancy.

allowing wikiwords in plan notes, and allowing referencing plan notes in wiki plan pages.

something like this. it is similar to the approach of planner mode emacs of which i am also a fan. although i am appreciating the GTD feel of tracks and rails flexibility a bit more these days.

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On February 2, 2007 at 02:12:47 (+0000), Anonymous commented:

I'm also strongly in favour of some wiki features, for the notes. I like !TiddlyWiki but it's too light-weight for every-day use. The wiki features there are definitely appreciated though.

For tracks, I was playing around with markdown/textile and I tend to think that one change that would almost get us wiki functionality would be if we could optionally name our notes, as !WikiWords, instead of indexing them by ID.

That way, you could refer to other notes via:

"link text":/notes/linkName

Which would be translated to: http://hostname/notes/linkname .

The next step might be a pre-parser to translate !WikiWords directly into textile format, up to and including the "notes/" portion.

I believe that would be sufficent for a wiki, as far as I'm concerned.

I may do some playing with Rails to see how tough this would be, and if there are other issues I'm not thinking of here.

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On February 2, 2007 at 02:23:22 (+0000), Anonymous commented:

dada.da : this sounds like an interesting approach. I think it would be cool to provide for extensibility in the WikiWord parsing -- that would be a cool way to integrate a more full-fledged wiki or even something like a contact management system.

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On June 6, 2008 at 10:13:17 (+0100), Anonymous commented:

Is would like to suggest a very simple approch. I could place a simple configuration option in tracks like:

http://mywiki.local/index.php?title={word}

If this variable is set, tracks parses all words like this:

This is [my article] in Wiki.

And creates autmaticly a like for it. I dont know ruby, but in other langs this could be done very simple with regular expressions.

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On December 12, 2011 at 13:50:28 (+0000), pavel.zupa commented:

I use wiki for my project notes (namely dokuwiki). I've tried to use Tracks to write some project notes but wiki is a wiki, everyone is used to something else. I believe a tool should not try to be able to do everything...

My proposal would be to add configuration option for wiki url like http://my.wiki.somewhere/projects:{placeholder} Then if this option is filled show a link icon on every project that would point to page on the wiki with placeholder replaced by actual project name.

There may be some issues with national characters in project names or standards for page names for different wikis. But maybe for starters replacing spaces with underscores would be sufficient...

Damn, since I discovered Tracks I hate I'm a Java developer. This should be pretty easy but after an hour i got totally lost in the code.

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On December 12, 2011 at 15:14:41 (+0000), lrbalt commented:

Haha, I was used to Java too, RoR was just an exiting new challenge :-)

We have one function that renders the note for todos/project which allready does some filtering. Does the markdown markup have something to reference a wiki page? We should try to use the same syntax.

Selecting the right project name for the placeholder is tricky. You could take the project name of the project that the todos belongs too, but what happens if you change the project of the todo. Or, in case of the project, what happens if you change the project name? Perhaps an edit field in the project edit form where you can enter the wiki page name for the project?

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On December 12, 2011 at 08:13:46 (+0000), pavel.zupa commented:

Man! Great, that was the hell of a quick reply! Ok, I’m thinking about wiki links as addition to existing project and todo notes not as a replacement. Notes I see as ideal place for short notes, like for todo “talk to my wife about my mountain trip”, the note is ideal for something like “don’t forget to mention she looked great in that dress last night”. On project “mountain trip” that’s where I’d like to see a link to wiki page “Mountain Trip” with all that brainstorming and packaging lists, map links and so on…

In fact I don’t think todos themselves need links to wiki. If so then i think each todo deserves it’s own page for simplicity. If you want to get to project wiki it's one more click... not that bad.

Now about the transformation of project name to link placeholder. I’ve been looking around and I think there are only a few link styles wikis use. For mediawiki it’s just spaces to underscores, it allows lower and upper case and is case sensitive. And it even allows national characters. For dokuwiki (which is my personal favourite) I would prefer national characters to be removed which is pretty hard task, also lowercasing the name would be nice. But I think for starters simple spaces-to-underscores (maybe also chars like '#?&*') should be good for most cases. Maybe for some future version the transformation could get more sophisticated.

The last problem is project renaming. I think the solution is to add a field to database (e.g. 'project_wiki'). Ok, what an idea:-) Stay with me, i believe the logic around this field could make it quite useful. So user creates project. The 'project_wiki' field is blank so user can freely rename the project. When user clicks the wiki button on project for the first time the 'project_wiki' field gets filled with actual project name (transformed). From this time on no changes to project name should be reflected in 'project_wiki' field (simple logic "if not blank"). User should be able to edit this field right from the beginning (even when it's not filled yet) so the transformation function does not need to be perfect because user can fix it.

What do you think? It's not as simple as I thought in the beginning but nothing ever is. Never ever:-)

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On December 12, 2011 at 10:46:05 (+0000), lrbalt commented:

no, nu such thing as simple :-)

I was not thinking about replacing notes with wiki, just adding a filter on it to find wiki-links. Like "follow me":url syntax for hyperlinks, mailto and onenote links. Now I think of this, maybe a wiki handler: "Mountain Trip":wiki://mountain_trip could be transformed into "Mountain Trip":http://wiki.yourserver.com/mountain_trip. No need to transform project names to wiki names, we let the user do that (how's that for user friendliness :-) )

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On December 12, 2011 at 11:08:40 (+0000), pavel.zupa commented:

in fact I already use it like that. I simply put the link in project note - pretty simple, pretty straightforward. But it's just link in note it does not give me the feeling "this is THE project page". And of course the lazyness factor:-) And my memory, don't get me started on my memory ... "what was the link like? wiki.my.home/projects: or wiki.my.home/projects/" ... ok i'm exaggerating a little.

Of course I understand that it is quite some work maybe a little added value. But in my view project knowing it's own wikipage is better than project with some link in it's note. The wiki button can be e.g. shown in list of projects ... some clicking saved. And of course "wiki interation" looks nice in feature list:-)

The idea of special short links is not bad, solves the user memory problem but still it's just a link in note. And still I have to do something... I create project (fill it's name) then I open new note and fill the project name again and when I click on that link I will have to fill it again in the wiki as heading. I was looking for a way to save at least one of those.

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On December 12, 2011 at 12:43:57 (+0000), lrbalt commented:

An easy change is just an edit field in the project edit form where you can enter the wiki page name for the project, perhaps with a one-time preference to set the server of the wiki with some template to place the page name. At project creation, you can prefill the project name with lowercase and underscores...

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On December 12, 2011 at 13:50:41 (+0000), pavel.zupa commented:

Ok. Having user editable field on project, config option for url template and some button or link to open the wiki seems like a good start. The more I'm thinking about this the more I'm tempted to learn at least RoR basics. Changing domain model seems like a little rough start. But i'm looking forward to trying to add some useful logic around this basic implementation. I just hope that "Someday/maybe" milestone is not too far:-)

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On December 12, 2011 at 09:01:19 (+0000), lrbalt commented:

it just takes one person to create a working patch :-)