Here is where we propose and discuss new features. If you think of a feature you’d like to see, post a new entry about it.
The new blog / news frontpage seems to hide most of SWiKs content. As the search does not always help, but SWiK has a powerful categorisation via Tags I suggest to create a page where you can browse for projects.
Image upload would be useful. I think it’s impossible now to store images, that are to be used in wiki page. (my use-case is here, I had to store images on external server)
SWiK is really pretty close to standards compliance, but how about going the last little bit and getting it?
The page footer throughout the site mentions the Creative Commons license, and the home page includes the corresponding graphic. How about also embedding the license metadata within the pages, so that Firefox’s mozcc extension (and other software) can use it? All you need to do is include
Post a new entry
<!--
<rdf:RDF xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
<Work rdf:about="">
<license rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/" />
</Work>
<License rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/">
<requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Attribution" />
<permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Reproduction" />
<permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Distribution" />
<permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/DerivativeWorks" />
<requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/ShareAlike" />
<requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Notice" />
</License>
</rdf:RDF>
-->
(including the comment delimiters) somewhere in the page, say, immediately after the link to the license in the footer template. See http://creativecommons.org/technology/web-integration and http://creativecommons.org/technology/licenseoutput#by-sa for more details.
I noticed that for projects that have a lot of information, it’s very hard to organize it. For example, http://swik.net/Spring – the navigation on the left hand bar has lots of random stuff in it, all the new stuff gets put in “page 2” of the navigation bar, etc. It would be nice for it to be easy to reorganize this information under fewer topics. Also, in popular pages there are pages and pages of information, only sortable by “recent” or “popular”. It would be nice for people to be able to more easily organize these. Depending on the page type, it’s not possible at all – for example a “links” page has no way (that i know of) to change the order the links are presented. This would be kind of like if Wikipedia did not let you add entries to a subject except at the end of the article.
On the changelog it would be cool if SWiK highlighted exactly what has changed between edits.
We do not support the full unicode character set in various areas of Swik yet.
Update Sept 26, 2005: Unicode is now fully supported!
Although the project robot is very impressive, one thing it frequently gets wrong is the project homepage. When it finds the project on freshmeat, if it would use the homepage (and download) links specified by freshmeat, the results would probably be more correct than the current (google-search based?) ones are.
We’re working on making the Robot better, it is based on various factors including Google, however the Freshmeat robots.txt forbids robots from following their homepage and download links. —Alex)
reply to alex: I don’t think you need to follow the freshmeat link in order to get useful information. James Stansell
I’ll do some tests to see if we can get good data this way – Alex
I did some tests to determine this, and it’s actually pretty tricky. There seems to be no easy way to determine whether Freshmeat or Google is right in a name conflict, thus it’s not easy to pick freshmeat’s link over Google’s. – Alex
Modify a page to point to one or more other pages.
Because SWiK allows pages to act as tags and pages simultaneously, a canonical page name is less easy to agree upon than in other systems, but there may be ways we can make joining similarly named pages easier.
It would be great if a feed of all items (getting started + about + dev + community etc) from a swik project were available, not just by individual category.
(reply from alex: definitely.)
Update Sept 26, 2005: We now support this! – Alex
What basis are you guys using to sort file releases? I loaded up the release data from SF.net but it’s not showing in date order, which is what I would have expected.
We don’t sort the initial RSS feed document that comes in in the right order every time, but subsequent news items should sort correctly. We’re working on fixing this—Alex
reply from jdpipe: cheers!
Update Sept 26, 2005: This is now fixed. -Alex
The current random function is calculated on the page load, but you can’t bookmark it if you want to browse randomly through the projects
Update Sept 26, 2005: The random link is now bookmarkable – Alex
including PHP and other language libraries/samples
SWiK currently doesn’t have a big list of projects, but we could do something where we listed out the most popular projects.
SWiK could do a big page that listed all the most popular tags, emphasizing the most popular. SWiK could also highlight really active users, or projects as well.
Currently SWiK only does a title search. In the future SWiK could offer an full-text search if the title lookup fails.
