I'm eagerly following the development of this extension for my own sinister motives. Frankly, I'm hoping that this extension will one day go beyond the "book realm", and become a hybrid which can also serve as a bookmark list in mediawikis.
Because I have that motive, whenever I try the extension and add pages to a collection/book-to-be, I get confused by loading and saving collections. I've been spoiled by cookies and user accounts, so I automatically assume that any collection _I_ make, is tied to my account or my cookie. I would personally prefer a collection to be automatically saved to user accounts, and automatically reloaded when I log back in. For me, this would be logical, and for people wanting to order books, I imagine, very useful, as "building a book" can take a while before everything is just right. To be honest, this extension could work just like "Watch list". To add pages to a watchlist, you simply click "add page to watchlist", and vica versa. To view your watchlist later on, you simply click "my watchlist". This is as simple as it gets, and in my mind, there's no reason why this extension couldn't work that way. An added benefit to making this extension work somewhat like watchlist, would be, that the "save collection" button could be simply removed. Whenever you log in, there's your collection, and any wiki articles you browse will know that they're part of it, ready for removal. EXCELLENT extension by the way, great work. Joen On Oct 22, 2:35 pm, Heiko Hees <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Richard, > > thanks for your input! Usability is an important issue and I want to > encourage everyone on the list to add ideas. > > On Oct 22, 2008, at 2:19 PM, Richard J Foster wrote: > > > 1) Better options for ordering articles - specifically, it would be > > great if a block of articles could be moved at once. Ideally this > > would be through some sort of drag operation. (Yes, I know that > > operation can be accomplished by editing the collection page directly, > > and that's fine for now). > > 2) Ability to change the order of chapters while maintaining the > > chapter contents. (I see this almost like an outline mode where a > > chapter may consist of one or more sections, each containing one or > > more articles.) > > I think those are technically related. Maybe we can use some existing > js-treeview widget. > E.g. something similar to this: > http://www.dhtmlx.com/docs/products/dhtmlxTree/index.shtml > > > > > 3) Ability to "lock" a collection (or at least articles in the > > collection) so it represents a particular snapshot of the wiki > > content. This would be useful for places where the wiki is used to > > document a product - especially a software product - because it is > > likely that functionality will change in subsequent versions, but it > > may also be desirable to allow certain articles (for example a known > > issues one) to be rendered using the most recent entry. > > This is almost there. Collections can be stored as ordinary wiki pages > and therefore one can reference to a certain version of a collection. > The ability to reference a certain version of an article in stored > collections is on our todo list:http://code.pediapress.com/wiki/ticket/325 > > > 4) Ability to specify some rendering options from the GUI. The main > > one which springs to mind is paper size. If the wiki is exposed > > internationally, then it may be desirable for LETTER size to be the > > default in America, while A4 (the current default) makes much more > > sense for Europe. From my point of view, it would be perfectly > > reasonable for any such settings to be stored in the collection > > Agreed. > > > 5) A mechanism to specify a book template. (E.g. When first created, a > > new book (collection) has a default set of pages such as an initial > > article giving details of the wiki from which it was generated, and an > > appendix page which shows the versions of the mwlib components used to > > create the output.) > > This can be accomplished by using a saved collection as a start for a > new collection. See above. > > I think we need to write a users guide which better explains the > advanced features and how to leverage them. As you might have noticed, > we are not too good in writing documentation. So anyone interested in > helping out? > > > Just a few thoughts.... There will probably be more after I've used > > mwlib for a while. I'm still in my first week! > > Great, always appreciating you input. > > Heiko --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mwlib" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mwlib?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
