[Typo3-dev] Porting mediaWiki to TYPO3?

[Ingmar Schlecht]

Hi Christian,

Christian Trabold wrote:
> Is there a chance to get a deeper insight into this project? What's the 
> schedule?

The timtaw (TYPO3 Is More Than A Wiki) extension has been started by 
Robert and me on the trip to the Snowboard Tour as an attempt to solve 
the problem of too much separation of http://typo3.org and 
http://wiki.typo3.org. We thought about how we could introduce the wiki 
way of editing content to TYPO3 without having to reinvent the wheel.
As we all know, TYPO3 has already got a Frontend Editing interface 
(Admin Panel), so it seemed logical to use that for the wiki.

So we decided to let the "Wikify" backend module create a virtual 
backend user during wikification of a page or page tree. Now, when a 
visitor of your wiki wants to edit something, he clicks on a pencil 
close to a content element and is then logged-in as that virtual Backend 
user. All the form rendering and permission control is already handled 
by the regular Frontend Editing - you can grant rights to the Timtaw 
Backend user the same way you grant rights to other Backend users, 
including things like excludefields or deny-field-values because the 
Timtaw user in fact IS a BACKEND user.

If you (as the wiki administrator) want to make a part of the pagetree 
wiki-editable, you just click "Wikify!" in the context menu of the page 
you wish to be your wiki-root.
Timtaw then automatically creates a new Backend user timtaw_md5asdf and 
sets that user as the owner of the selected page as well as its subpages 
(if option 'include subpages' is selected). Furthermore, the pages will 
have a check-box "Wiki" set.

The great thing is, that you can that way declare a page to be 
temporatily editible, and a month later you can sort of freeze the 
current state by dewikifying the page again, which means the public 
can't change anything any more and it's a regular page again.

OK, that's about it.

Unfortunately I can't say much about a schedule because personally I'm 
quite busy in school currently, but on the snowboardtour Sebastian 
Kurfuerst enthusiastically joined us in working on it, maybe he'll find 
time to continue working on it. Also Robert might be willing to finish 
it in the process of the typo3.org Spring-Cleaning(tm).

Sebastian already comitted Timtaw to typo3xdev CVS: 
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/typo3xdev/tx_timtaw/
However, it has to be regarded as a work in progress, nothing really 
usable yet.

cheers,
Ingmar

-- 
Ingmar Schlecht <ingmar at typo3.org>
Lübeck/Germany