If you miss a feature, have a neat idea or any other suggestion, please put it here. To discuss the merit of the planned extensions from MoinMoinTodo or ideas presented here, please use MoinMoinDiscussion.

See:

• ExtensionGuidelines for a set of rules that should govern MoinMoin development.

• MacroMarket for extension macros written by users.

• UtilityScripts contains some useful scripts written by MoinMoin users.

Index:

See also: WikiIdeas WikiWikiSuggestions Ward's Meta-Wiki

Your ideas always welcome here...

Current Discussion

Timestamping

Sometimes I use MoinMoin for a weblog-type recording of events. It would be great to have maybe a macro that gets substituted by the current date and time when the user saves the page.

Something like Time''''''Stamp that would get substituted by 31/01/01 17:05, just one time.

Use Server Authentication

It would be nice if the wiki would automatically determine if a user has been authenticated through a web server and use that for the User. If I happened to be using IIS, I could set it up to authenticate and then use os.environ['REMOTE_USER'] to find out who they are. If I were using Apache, I could do the same. If I were using Orion, etc, etc.

EMail send page

It would be nice if the page, one is currently reading or changing could be sent to an arbitrary email. This could perhaps be a new action and added to a toolbar. -- GM

Email notification

Email notification about changed wiki pages? Yes, definitely.

An alternative is some method of indicating that a particular page is of interest to some person or groups of people. The Attention Page macro on MacroMarket is one attempt towards this end. -- RichardJones

We have a working system for this at Lineo. The python module for this is located at [action/mailchanges.py]. Our system works as follows:

To subscribe to a page, a user puts the word "Subscribers" as a heading, at any level (preceded and follow it with equals signs) anywhere on the page. Then a user puts their e-mail address under this heading. Multiple e-mail addresses are allowed. Due to the nature of wikis, anyone can add or remove their (or anyone elses) "subscription" at any time. On submission of the edited page, the page "diff" is mailed to all addresses so registered.

For example, to subscribe to this page, I could just put the following on it:

===== Subscribers =====
tbird@lineo.com

• -- TimBird

Structured Text Markup

A simple BizarStructuredText markup has been written and is available on the ParserMarket page. It is very similar to the StructuredText that Digital Creations developed for Zope. Its differences are mostly to do with ease of use. I also included the table markup as defined in the standard wiki markup that MoinMoin ships with. -- RichardJones

Macro Collection

I realize that this wouldn't be part of the MoinMoin itself, but there should be a repository in the download area for MoinMoin macros that people have written. As of the latest version, it's so easy to write macros, there should be a place where we can place macros we've written so others can get them (I've written some macros that people have asked for in other areas of this site, Even a macro that will look for all macros available on a MoinMoin and list them!) -- Christian Bird - chris.bird@lineo.com

Either send them directly to me (jh@web.de) or to the moin-dev mailing list (moin-dev@dragon-ware.com). Then I'll add them to the default distribution or to a new macro collection.

See the new MacroMarket page. Interestingly enough, creating that page did not require any change to the code, though you can directly rip the macros from the subpages.

-- JürgenHermann

Category based headers

It would be interesting to throw a custom header (logo graphic, navigational links, css ) based on a tag similar to a ProcessingInstructions tag. ie: #homepage If no instruction were found, would use site-wide default. This might be non-trivial if header is currently thrown before parsing the page.

--MattWestervelt

Garth's Wishlist

I'm sure these should be put elsewhere, sorted, etc. I'm equally sure that if anyone is really bothered by where I've put them they can refactor them.

I'm currently trying to figure out whether I can adapt MoinMoin so that I can produce a consolidated Wiki and blog site so that Wiki pages and blog entries can point to each other really easily. If the potential seems to be there, I'm sure I'll get around to hacking these guys in eventually.

--GarthKidd

• The direction MoinMoin ==> blog is easily handled by the InterWiki mechanism. -- jh

  • True, but I want to be able to use Wiki style formatting (particularly the references) in the blog entries, too. It could be as simple as: numbered files are blog entries, named files are Wiki pages.

    I'll rabbit on more in BlogBlog. -- gtk

Smart Edit Conflict Detection

One of my hacks to ZWiki was to suppress edit conflict detection if it figured that someone was colliding with themselves. This enabled the familiar edit-back-edit-back action without letting people collide with each other.

Suppress Gratuitous WikiNames

In a page which MoinMoin mentions another MoinMoin several times, it's a bit irritating MoinMoin to have every single MoinMoin of them highlighted as a MoinMoin link. I'd like to render only the first in the page or, if there are multiple headings in the document, the first time under a particular heading.

• I don't get you here, too much "MoinMoin"s. Do you mean wiki links? -- jh

  • Let's just say that it would have been nice to see MoinMoin underlined and blue only once in that paragraph.

    For another example, check how often MoinMoin gets repeated in GarthKidd. In ZWiki, at least users can prepend the WikiName with a bang to suppress the escaping (though things get very messy at the beginning of a line, where ! is overloaded to suppress escaping the whole line), but "banging it out" has to be done manually. I'd prefer something automatic.

Hotkeys

Minor format tweak for the user interface: the accesskey attribute on an INPUT is a major timesaver, letting people save changes without having to reach for their mouse. It's only MSIE, but that's a major proportion of the userbase.

• Give a concrete HTML code sample (e.g. for the editor page's "Save" button). -- jh
  • input type="submit" value="save changes" accesskey="s", I think. I'll look it up and get back to you.

Another Random Wishlist

This is a wishlist from an older version --- some of this stuff has already been done, other stuff is dealt with elsewhere... some of it's novel, hopefully.

1. Full support for StructuredText (standard?) -- will come, I still owe Richard the adaption of his code

2. Page delete? -- yes, code is there
3. Page rename? -- yes, code is there

4. true raw HTML (cf. HelpOnProcessingInstructions) -- if some1 gives me a reliable HTML filtering module (remove <script>, <object> and the like), no problem

5. Edit the InterWiki map from within the Wiki.

6. Extend the ToC macro so that a ToC for one page can be embedded in another
7. Transclusion would be nice, after all.
8. More metadata on pages: instead of just last edit time, that + who edited.

9. edit code for Wiki implementation through the Wiki -- use XSLT

10. embed Python code directly in Wiki pages? { { { } } }, hilighting will come
11. number clicks total, number clicks since last rev reported per-page

12. WhoHasReadThis - read history per-page

13. MyFavoritePages - an automatic personal most-visited list, for easier nav to common stuff

14. embeddable diagram tools: cf: HotDraw, JavaHotDraw (?)

15. smart dynamic "macros" such as "list of 5 most recent changes like xxx..."

16. More in-site administration / config: WikiDashboard?

17. Visual Wiki! Check out VisualizeTheWiki. The mind boggles.

18. More filters / views...

19. Diff view should give several other pieces of info -- ==> PageInfo

    • who made the most recent edit
    • history list of previous revs

20. Filters / sorts on RecentChanges:

    • there are four columns: Diff, WikiWord, EditTime, and Editor

    • should be able to sort by each...
    • size of Diff delta

    • alpha by WikiWord (title)

    • sort by time (default, the way it works now)
    • who's the author / Editor

21. More robust "RecentChanges" functionality:

    • NewPages

    • ChangedPages

    • MyRecentChanges

    • MyNewPages

    • MyChangedPages

22. FindSimilar capability. -- LikePages

23. Blog-like way to post a link to a personal links page via a bookmark.
24. Bookmark / feed page.
25. Personal pages / views.
26. Transitive search (i.e., content / history search).
27. Eventually: dynamic history!
28. Easy upload of real docs vi WebDAV, interaction -w- external docs!!!
29. Grammar checker? -- unlikely

-- JeffBone, jbone@jump.net

Take this with a grain of salt: if you don't even take the time to weed out the done points, why should I care to implement the rest? And there is some pretty heavy stuff in there, even if it might not look like that. A good third is too sketchy to even get what you mean. -- JürgenHermann

This was more of a braindump than a series of requests, Jürgen. Given cycles, I'll be happy to come back and try to clarify and cleanup; but in the meantime, rather than keeping this locked in our Wiki, I thought I'd dump it up here. That way, if there's anything of value in it, somebody else can benefit. But to your question, you shouldn't care to implement anybody's requests, unless it just tickles your fancy. If any of the above does that, great, otherwise, that's fine too. -- JeffBone

Older entries

General:

• TopicMaps

• Versioning (via CVS), optional (not hi-prio, the current versioning works quite nice)
• Change control? (checkin-checkout support for files?? This starts to get into the realm of workflow management tools... but it'd sure be nice!)

• HierarchicalWikiWiki's (grouping of different projects)

• Possibly make it a webserver (advantage: configuration is kept in memory)

  • Consider Mod Snake: http://modsnake.sourceforge.net/ -- it allows one to write Apache modules in Python.

  • or use asyncore.py, a select()-based server-module used by Zope.

  • problem here is that there's a few places that MoinMoin is not really safe for persistence. I'm going to actually go through and document them at some stage (I'm particuarly interested in places where globals are used) -- RichardJones

• Local anchors and links on a page

• Maybe add edit locks with manual breaking & timeouts.

• At least warn the user if a page was opened for editing within the last x minutes.

• WantedPages (a list of not yet created WikiName links)

• remove the information at the bottom of the page. I have not seen this on another wiki and it is confusing. example-- config=, total= imports-
  • this is a testing wiki

• Page background images? #PRAGMA BACKGROUND maybe.

• tables with lists inside cells? lists with tables inside listitems? tablecells that span multiple lines? Not very probable, because too hard to implement, and also leaves the "easy wiki markup" realm.

• todo.org has quickhelp on the edit page:

  wikiname == WikiWord and [[nonspaces]] (digit and kanji are available) 
  http://, ftp://, news://, mailto: automatically linked 
  list(3 spaces and *) 
  list(3 spaces and +) 
  '' italic 
  ''' bold 
  { { {, } } } for <pre> 
  empty line for <p> 
  ---- for <hr> 

• ModularizeForReuse - this is happening right now

• IdeaForSurveyPolls

• HTML escape - '<html>' tag on a line by itself switches on raw html processing until turned off by '</html>', I know this isn't in the "easy wiki markup" realm but sometimes it's really useful eg converting existing docs, more complex tables etc. I have patches against 0.4 .. will add the feature to 0.5 and post a patch soon. Alexei

  • Write a parser (see MoinMoin/parser/*.py) for this

• Move color management into moin_config.py rather than spread all over default.css.

• A macro that expands to the current date when the page is submitted. So that one easily can insert it in aid to others that follow the conversation. Maybe something like  [[.sig]]  that will expand to whatever the UserPreferences is set to.

• Is there any way to have incremental backups made over time? If there was, having a single person 'destroy' the MoinMoin would have minimal effect -- simply restore from backup.

  • Click on the blue "i" at the top-right corner of the page: each page has a full history.

Security (against the WikiNature, and possibly not needed when we have versioning):

• Some kind of access authorization, via pages with a special WikiName

• Lockout-Lists, like IRC channel bans
• A grant/revoke scheme, much like advogato (different right levels/checkboxes, can pass own rights on to others), with the wiki admin as the root and full rights.
• Page approval, see Meatball's ideas page.

• other SecurityNeeds may come up in different environments

This is what is left from Piki-Todo:

• Should have a way to attach images to uploaded pages.

• Implement Edit-Copy as in OriginalWiki. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MoreAboutBackupCopies

• http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?FederatedWiki

• Show most-often-read pages.
• Fix atomic-rename and locking of editlog on NT.
• Merge implementations of Full-Search and Title-Search
• Full-Search should also search titles
• At the top (or bottom), show the last 5-10 pages you visited so you can quickly move around.

  • Sounds like a good idea, depends on UserPreferences though.

Also check out the patches in http://linuxcare.com.au/mbp/piki/patches/