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Gobi Troubles

While editing the page about my template engine, I encountered quite a few problems with Gobi:

The page was first named "Helma 2 Templates - jürg" (with an umlaut), which was not causing problems first, but when I uploaded an attachment to it, the attachment could not be found when following the link afterwards.
I then tried to put the code as inline text on the page, which caused a SQL error: java.lang.RuntimeException: Error retrieving Node: java.sql.SQLException: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ''\(\' AND page.parent_id = 339' at line 1 (/usr/local/dev.helma.org/code/Page/PageCore.js#373).
I then wanted to rename the page but didn't find that function, so I started a new one (and couldn't delete the old one).

So far I find it generally complicated and not really intuitive to work with this Wiki:

Many things need to be done with HTML tags. I would prefer if there were shortcuts to the things we really need (images, links, etc), and everything else would automatically get escaped. For example: Why not letting the (STAR)-operator create external links as well? And there could be an extended version of it, where the title of the link could be added, separated by a colon. E.g: (STAR)http:// www.helma.org:Helma(STAR). This could even be used for internal links...
The font size is far too big on Mac / Safari.
There should be the possibility for subpages, so "Helma 2 Templates" could function as a parent for all the different pages about Templating stuff, otherwise this ends in chaos quickly.
For simple comments about content, it's often easier to use a comment function instead of adding to the page itself, without a clear convention of how we should do so. Either we need a page about Wiki conventions, or a more conventional forum / weblog mechanism for comments.
Special Wiki characters should be escapable with a backslash, so they can also be used as normal chars.

All this makes me wonder if we wouldn't be better off with a system like Trac that just works?

Thanks, Jürg. Some of these issues just have to do with settings which can/could be changed. Some other things are still missing in Gobi, and I'll address these. I invite you wholeheartly to get your feet wet and help with improving gobi. Going with somebody else's dogfood just because of some initial troubles? Two words: NO WAY! -hns

I'm sorry, Hannes. It probably sounded quite offensive to you, I guess I was somehow frustrated at the end. A fast and efficient development of Helma 2 just has a far higher priority for me than improving Gobi. I don't feel like having to fix this first in order to be able to work and communicate nicely on all things Helma 2, as I don't have enough time for this at the moment. That's why I asked that question in the end. But in order to change that spirit again, here some ideas of improvement:

A RSS feed on the Updates page would be very handy, so I could subscribe easily to changes and wouldn't have to come back here daily to often see that nothing changed. Or even better: Any page should allow to be subscribed to by RSS, even SVN pages.
<div class="reply"> Should become a special character "tag" as well, and nested replies like this one here should change color, like in many email readers. And the should add spaces between each other, so I wouldn't need to add <br />.

- juerg

Thanks, Hannes, for reacting so quickly and fixing many of the problems.
Some more input here:

I tried to comment to your weblog post Gobifood but couldn't, as Gobi does not allow me to edit it, and there is no comment function.
The link to history.rss asks me to log in, although I am already logged in. I guess I am not allowed to see the page's history, because I'm not the editor of it.

And again, please excuse my somewhat di initial reactions to these problems. I am impatient sometimes ;)
- juerg

Juerg, thanks for keeping pushing and trying and complaining. Without you, nothing would have changed here in these last days.

The reason you can't do some things on this site is you aren't registered as member or admin. This is because I want this site to work the same for any registered user. The history page for weblog postings was reserved to the posting's owner. I just changed that (was really easy btw).
-hns

Pages linking to this page: Regarding Gobi

Gobi Troubles

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