On Wednesday, October 05, 2005 3:46 PM C Y > > I am uneasy about doing any significant work in the Plone > environment, because I have a feeling it might never be > part of the "active" Axiom website (I doubt Plone-Axiom > gets many web hits, for example.)
The web site statistics for September http://page.axiom-developer.org/usage/usage_200509.html show 671 hits on /zope/plone/login_form - compared to the 4576 hits on /zope/mathaction/FrontPage that's pretty small. But we are sort of comparing "apples to oranges". Many many more people read pages from the Axiom wiki aka MathAction compared to the number of people who edit them or even bother to comment on them. It's a very public place. The Plone site, on the other hand is primarily focused on those people who might have some interest in creating some content - either for their own use or for distribution to others. So, actually I find 671 attempts to login as a registered user of the Axiom portal rather impressive! But still the evidence is that the majority of users still only read content here also instead of creating it. :( > I would prefer to work in just one environment, It depends on what kind of "work" you want to do, doesn't it? Both of these environments are built as Zope applications so they have a lot in common in spite of the outer appearance. In fact, it turns out that there is a way to configure zope with ZWiki and Plone so that the same wiki content appears in both user interfaces. The different user interfaces can be completely controlled by applying different "skins". This means that a user can, but default say access the site as if it was "just" a wiki the way wiki.axiom-developer.org looks now. But if they choose, they can click on a "Plone" link which invokes the "portal skin" so that the other Plone bells and whistles (e.g. the bibliography) become visible and the wiki appears just as embedded in the portal. In the portal skin they can then log in and also create private content etc. In effect, I think this is the "best of both worlds" but it is a little complicated to setup. I have a test version setup here http://test.axiom-developer.org/mathaction Clicking on the "plone" link in the upper right corner asks you to log in and then it displays the same wiki contents with the Plone wrapper. I haven't had a lot of time to play with this, so it may not be working quite 100% yet. But I would be quite interested in your opinion of this effort. The versions of Zope, Plone and ZWiki on which this test environment was based are already quite out of date, although they were current as of about 7 months ago. I forget actually, exactly what I was doing with this test site 7 months ago beside the wiki/portal skin thing. Just looking at it now I see that the LaTeX wiki part of the site seems broken so perhaps that was when I was also experimenting with Bob McElrath's then dvipng-based approach to generated graphics from LaTeX. Recently Bob and I have been discussing via #axiom-developer irc some ideas about again upgrading MathAction to the newest releases (including his latest LatexWiki stuff) *and* also setting up a live mirror site for MathAction as a backup. I guess we think we know how to do what we want to do, but of course then there is the question of when and how to find the time to impermanent it. :( There is never enough time... there is never enough time... > perhaps implementing an alternative bibliography solution in the > wiki or some such - maybe this would be of interest? > http://wikindx.sourceforge.net/index.html > I am aware of WIKINDX. It's a nice effort but it lives in a very different software environment than ZWiki and Plone:: WIKINDX Requirements: 1. PHP >= v4.3.x 2. MySQL >= v3.23.xx 3. Apache >= v1.3.x PHP is the "other way" to design web applications these days - probably more popular than Zope. The difference between Zope and PHP is quite literally quite similar to the difference between Axiom and Maxima. One of the difficulties of building applications with Zope is the strongly typed object-oriented environment that I mentioned earlier. On the other hand, if one is prepared to invest the time to learn to use Zope properly, then it is possible to build some rather sophisticated applications with very little coding, compared to the large amount of (relatively easy) "hacking" required to get a PHP application off the ground. It is essentially the same thing with Axiom. I rather like this accidental family relationship between Zope and Axiom. In fact, it goes even deeper since Zope is implemented in Python which is a strongly-typed (but dynamic) language with a "pile" block syntax just like SPAD which is strongly-typed (but static) programming language. PHP on the other hand is essentially a variant of Perl - another "engineering-oriented" language ;) to steal Tim Daly's phrase. > > Hmm. Nifty! Can a user select a subset of entries to > generate a bibtex file, or is it only one at a time? > If you login in at http://page.axiom-developer.org/zope/Plone/refs/axiombib The 'download' tab will download the entire contents of the Axiom bibliography as one large BibTeX file. The 'contents' tab will allow you to delete and copy entries. I don't know anyway how to download just a subset based on a query. But perhaps there is some way to do this in the newer release of the bibliography product. > > Another thought is that a "global" bibtex file generated from > this system could provide the foundation bib file for the > Axiom codebase, assuming one can be automatically generated. Yes, this could be done automatically using crontab job and wget to trigger the kind of 'download' that I described above. > Maybe we could even rig up a way to have the codebase repository > updated each time a bibliography update is committed via web, Yes, at least it could be done nightly or whatever using wget. > and have the website updated every time a new bibtex entry is > put into the repository. > I am less sure how to do that but that is also likely possible based on a tla -diff or something of that sort. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
