WikiForNow

As lead on a Zope-team gig where we were co-designing and developing a Zope system with the customers developers, i needed a tool for managing an online, dynamically growing collection of design artifacts. Z Wiki, the premier Zope-based Wiki, was a good candidate, but we struggled with the utter lack of organization of a large and growing body of pages. I devised and implemented a Wiki mechanism to tame this overwhelming disorganization, which i called "parenting" - basically, an adjustable page hierarchy which derives automatically according to the origins of one page from another. With some gardening, to retrofit relationships to existing pages, this turned out to do the trick, and worked beautifully for this project.

("parenting" is a Crafty Hacks of which i'm proud, and one which i am starting to see other wikis adopt - i think i was the first to come up with and implement the idea, and would like to see it catch on...)

Jim, Zope Corp's chief technical officer and outstanding guru, recognized the value and commissioned me to cultivate from this basis whatever else might be necessary to use these Wikis for Zope's extensive community and customer collaborations. I instigated the WikiForNow effort, implementing some key features, including:

• parenting, as mentioned above
• page commenting, an easy, lower-impact alternative to editing a page
• edit contention prevention, the "saftey belt" which helps multiple concurrent editors avoid stomping one another's edits
• through-the-web page rename and delete
• through-the-web page format setting, surfacing the choice of the various formats to the page editor
• adding of images and files from a wiki page
• page history review and management, surfacing Zope's object history to the page editor
• page access regulation, giving control over basic editing, the above features, and access regulation itself, to the page originator
• and more
• i also developed many crucial refinements and fixes of existing functionality.

See the WikiForNowDevelopments page for an account of the developments, as well as the development process.

This is another case where having an active user base - in this case, the Zope community - was key (sometimes, urgently and maddeningly so:) to effective, incisive development.

Starting around Jan 2001, the WikiForNow wikis are still (as of this writing, in Jan 2006) a central tool in both the Zope community (the fishbowl process) and probably are still key in Zope Corporation's customer development collaboration faculties. My additions were also adopted in the mainline ZWiki.

Bright Gray Heart