CampSmalltalk: SmallWiki

In Portland, I want to make SmallWiki good enough to replace WikiWorks. The Smalltalk world does not need so many wikis, and SmallWiki seems to me to have a nicer basic design than WikiWorks, though WikiWorks has been tried by fire and consequently is more robust.

Why is SmallWiki so nice? First, it has a nice OO design. A wiki contains a set of things, including pages, resources (files up-loaded to the wiki), and wikis. Yes, you can nest wikis. So, you could have a wiki for your user groups, and then make a subwiki for a project. SmallWiki uses the Visitor pattern to process pages or wikis. Everything is an object, text is a secondary format.

Second, it has a nice security model. Read the papers.

Third, it is portable. It runs in both Squeak and VW, and should be easy to port to other dialects.

Fourth, it has a nice unit test suite. Anything we make at Camp Smalltalk should have tests, too.

Fifth, it has an active development community in Berne. So, if we make sure that we pick small problems and make complete solutions, we can hand the solutions over and know that someone else will keep them going.

The version of SmallWiki that we will use incorporates Seaside.

Here are some ideas for improvement. Feel free to add your own.

SmallWiki: Better persistence
SmallWiki: Fix RSS support
SmallWiki: Security good enoufh for my class
SmallWiki: Better antispam measures
A set of widely varying Style Sheets to show what can be done.
Style rules that are bit more compatible with swiki. (example I ran into, carriage returns are paragraphs in Smallwiki - Breaks in swiki).
Clearer administration screens

If you want to work on this project, join the SmallWiki mailing list, where I am talking to the authors about it, and put your name below.

People working on SmallWIki at Camp Smalltalk in Portland

Ralph Johnson