http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=174448

A WikiWiki (more commonly now just called "Wiki") is a writable web site. In many ways it's like perlmonks, but it's much less structured, allowing anyone to edit anything on the site. This has the potential to lead to chaos, but for some reason it seems to work.

Now most of the Wikis out there seem to be written in Perl. From the original WikiWiki to twiki and usemod Wiki.

Unfortunately none of them allow you to use POD as the authoring language. And almost all of them seem to hard code the HTML formatting of the output (you can add design/style around the borders of the Wiki - like wrapping the whole thing in an IFRAME, but you can't redesign how a paragraph looks without hacking the Perl code).

Anyway, I wanted to play with the idea of a Wiki based on server side XSLT. And I wanted a POD wiki. And since I wrote AxKit, I wanted to do it in AxKit.

The result is the AxKit Wiki. All the editing is done online in POD format, and on the fly converted to XML using Pod::SAX. Then XSLT stylesheets transform the POD to HTML. This allows you total control over the style of the output from plain XSLT stylesheets.

The current code is pretty simple - no versioning, no user management, and so on. But I'll extend it over time. The code is on CPAN, as AxKit::XSP::Wiki. Installation is pretty simple if you have a working AxKit install. Please let me know if you try it (either online, or try installing it yourself) how you get on.

Matt.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Pod and AxKit based Wiki
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 15, 2002 at 05:21 UTC
    EEEK!

    The wiki done gone berserk. Editing induces a stack trace. You ought to fix that.

[reply]
Re: Pod and AxKit based Wiki
by lestrrat (Deacon) on Jun 15, 2002 at 00:03 UTC

    I'm tempted to try (since I have AxKit running on my box anyway) but I guess I'm not comfortable and I'm sort of confused with the whole Wiki concept...

    For example, what's the point in allowing people to edit PODs? Not that I'm against it or anything, I just don't know what it would be good for...?

    (AxKit rocks...)

[reply]
      The nice thing about being able to put POD directly online this way is it's the format we use for our module documentation, so we can just cut and paste from docs. We also already know the format - we work in it day in day out, so we know that code starts with an indent, bold is B<>, and ¨aut;mlauts are E<umlaut> and so on. This reduces the Cognitive Dissonance that comes with some perl hacker coming along wanting to add something to the Wiki.

      The whole Wiki concept definitely is confusing. At first I would think that it leads to complete chaos. But it doesn't seem to. A great couple of links on this are Why Wiki Works and Why Wiki Works Not.

[reply]
      What's the point in allowing people to edit PODs?

      Think of POD as an alternate Wiki markup language. The standard Wiki markup language is pretty limiting. By supporting POD, you can both use POD for markup when editing a Wiki page, or, perhaps, import existing PODs into your Wiki.

[reply]

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